Request for help: Line Art from Photograph

[kingsley]

G'day from downunder!

I've got a bit of a challenge at the moment. I have to turn an image from a coloured photograph into a line art drawing so that it can be used for plaque.

Can anyone point me in the direction of some good techinques or software?

Cheers

Kingsley
Perth, Western Australia

[Xaran]

Can you tell us what software if any you already have?

If you can post a copy of the picture it would also help as technique can vary depending on the complexity of the image and what you need to finish up with.

Christine

[kingsley]

Thanks Christine

I have CS2 Creative Suite as my main image editing software.

I have just attached the two images which I have extracted the two gentlemen from their respective photos and need to combine them as line art into one image for a display at a front of a building. I am only going to use head and shoulders.

Cheers

Kingsley

[Xaran]

This was done very quickly but if this is the sort of thing your looking for - I just used PS CS2 photocopy filter and cleaned up the image by painting out unwanted parts and smudging others.

Better results good be obtained with a high quality original. Unfortunately I would have to say I dont think you'll get much of a result with the second picture at all as the part of the image is way too small. You really need high quality images to get a good result.

If what you are looking for is really crisp line art you would need to use a vector program and either hand trace the lines or possibly use the auto trace features in programs like Illustrator or Xara Xtreme. Trial downloads of these are available from Adobe and Xara. I use both but would recommend Xara Xtreme ($79 to buy)

Christine

[mistermonday]

Here is one of many ways to make sketch from a photo.
Duplicate your background (Ctrl J), the Ctrl+Shift+U to desaturate the new layer (1). Next Ctrl+J to duplicate layer 1. Next Ctrl I to invert that layer (2). Change the blend mode of that top layer (2) to Color Dodge. Your image will turn completely white (there may be some black spots - don't worry about them). On the top layer do Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and drag the slider from 0 up thru 1, 2, 3 pixels. As you drag the slider, more detail will emerge. Stop when you have a reasonable looking sketck (better to under do it - see the next step). Now select a soft black brush at a very low opacity of 1 or 2 or 3 % and paint over areas wherew you want to bring out more detail like eyes of facial lines. Then change the brush to white (increase the opacity) and paint over any black areas or areas of the background that you want to erase. This should give you a pretty good result (see the sample attached).

However if you want to take it further and make it look like line art or a charcoal sketch, you can add textture (Filter>Texture>Texturizer) or you can apply a motion blur or one of the many artistic filters.
Regards, Murray

[kingsley]

thanks guys - I am getting some hi-rez scans of the images and will have a crack at it and will post a reply with them - probably on the weekend. cheers
kingsley

[lkroll]

Used Xero's Pastellize filter as an edge detect. Some cleaning, and fed it into my Autotrace script (converted to vector). I ported the vector into GIMP and saved. Here's a higher quality version (14% quality attached).

[Xaran]

Or try the new Sketch plugin form AKVIS.

AKVIS

Christine

[lkroll]

Originally Posted by Xaran

Or try the new Sketch plugin form AKVIS.

AKVIS

Christine

Sample results look fantastic, but the package is a little too pricey for me. Maybe Danny can have a challenge and give this one to the winner.

[Littlecoo]

Flaming Pear has some good plugins that may be of interest to you. LINK

[lkroll]

Just was PM'ed (not going to say who) that I might have offended Danny in some way by my earlier suggestion (which was in jest by the way). I had not known that prizes were direct from Danny's pocket (always assumed that they were from sponsors). I will keep my muses to myself in future opines. As a side note, I'm very appreciative of Danny's efforts, both on this forum and others. He's been a blessing in many ways from his talents. He's helped me with items from Impressionist, to B/W conversions via his actions that I find quite useful from time to time.

[DannyRaphael]

Originally Posted by lkroll

Just was PM'ed (not going to say who) that I might have offended Danny in some way by my earlier suggestion (which was in jest by the way). I had not known that prizes were direct from Danny's pocket (always assumed that they were from sponsors). I will keep my muses to myself in future opines. As a side note, I'm very appreciative of Danny's efforts, both on this forum and others. He's been a blessing in many ways from his talents. He's helped me with items from Impressionist, to B/W conversions via his actions that I find quite useful from time to time.

Definitely no offense taken, LK, and thanks for your kind words. Thanks, too, to whomever PM'd you who was looking out for me.

Sorry, I don't have a freebee of this one to offer as a prize. Wish I did.

~Danny~