And today I'm going to share with you a quick and easy way to convert your photos to a simple

sketch in Photoshop.

You're going to be using the good old ingredients - Blend Modes, Blend If and filters.

But, you know what?

The only thing that makes a recipe great is the right combination.

And what is it?

Let's find out.

So, without any further ado, let's get started.

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Back in the magical world of Photoshop.

And if you wanna go ahead and download any of the photos shown in the tutorial, check

the links in the description.

So, here we have our surface image open, the surface on which we're going to place the

pencil sketch.

So, let's go to our Finder or Explorer and drag and drop in the subject over the canvas,

right.

Over the canvas, not here, over the canvas.

Now it's time for us to adjust it.

Let's rotate it a little bit.

Let's make it a little smaller and place it over the notebook, just like this.

Now when it's time for us to mask out the areas which we do not want in the pencil sketch.

With the Subject layer selected, click on the Mask button right there.

Now, take the brush, make sure the foreground color is black, because black hides, make

the brush a little bigger, with a soft brush just erase the areas which you do not want.

I want to decrease the flow to about 20% because I want to fade the bottom of the subject just

like that.

You might as well want to go even lower to maybe 10% when you're working on the subject.

Now, when you're not working on the subject, you can always go higher, maybe 40% and just

erase the areas which you do not need.

Now let us adjust the subject again.

With the Subject layer selected, press Ctrl or Command + T, and now, let's make it a little

smaller, place it right over here, that seems to be nice.

And this looks all right.

Now, once you're ready with this, hit Enter or Return.

Because we want to have the fading of the subject, have a look here, the fading of the

subject needs to be a part of the filter, not just a normal fading.

And for that we need to add a white background.

So, with the Background selected, click on the Adjustment layer icon and choose a Solid

Color and choose the color White.

Now, don't worry about it.

It will be hidden because we're going to change the Blend Mode to Multiply.

Now, as we can see, there's a little bit area left over here.

So select the Subject Mask, take the brush, black as the foreground color and just paint

black on it.

It's fine.

Now, we need to select both, the Subject and the color Fill layer.

So, select the Subject layer, hold the Ctrl or Command, select the Color Fill layer.

Right click on it and choose Convert to Smart Object.

Now it's all one.

Now, if you want to access the Mask or any of the Properties, you can always double click

on the thumbnail, a new document will show up with the Mask and everything, the background

layer as well.

And if you want to change anything, change it right here and go to File - Save and it

will update the original document.

I don't want to do anything.

So I'm just going to simply close this down.

Now, let's change the Blend Mode from Normal to Multiply because Multiply is the Blend

Mode which darkens stuff.

And the Blend Mode - Multiply hides everything which is 100% white.

Have a look at it, it's already giving you a nice effect.

Now it's time for us to apply the Pencil Sketch Filter.

So let's go to Filter - Filter Gallery.

Now inside of that, just make sure this just one filter right there.

If there are more, you're going to select them and click on the Delete button right

there.

So we're going to go under Sketch, and under Sketch, you're going to find Graphic Pen,

and it automatically gives your image very nice sketch effect.

Let's zoom in.

And there are values that you can control.

You can control the Stroke Length, whatever you want, but, I'm going to keep it at 9.

9 works fine for me, and Light/Dark Balance, I'm going to leave it at 57.

You can play with it.

See what works for your image.

Stroke Direction can be anything you want.

You can keep it Horizontal, you can keep it Left Diagonal.

Let's leave it at Right Diagonal for this example, and just hit OK.

It's wonderful, isn't it?

But if you zoom in, there's one problem.

When we sketch with a pen or a pencil on a piece of paper, it's never 100% black.

So, to add a little bit of realism, we need to include the texture of the paper into the

subject, into the sketch.

And how do we do that?

Simple.

Blend If.

So, with the Subject layer selected, double click on the right hand side of the layer,

this opens up the Layer Style dialog box.

Now, take the slider of the underlying layer from right to left.

This takes away the bright areas of the layers which are underneath it from the current layer.

But right now when we take it away, it's very, very harsh, right?

So we need to soften it up a little bit.

So, hold the Alt or Option, click on the slider to break it apart, and just take it apart.

As easy as that.

And have a look at it, the texture of the paper is showing up in here.

Pretty nice, isn't it?

You can take it even further if you want to.

But I'm going to leave it at about 228, that's fine for this example and hit OK once you're

satisfied.

Also, it's too dark on the left hand side.

What to do?

Let's decrease the Opacity.

So, let's set it to about 75%.

See how it is.

Maybe 77%.

Let's zoom out and have a look.

Wow, that is much more, way more realistic.

But there's, again, one more problem.

If you zoom in, have a look at the sketch, it's very sharp.

We never do such sharp sketches.

It's pixel sharp.

So, we need to add a little bit of blur to it.

And how do we add blur?

You already know that.

Go to Filter - Blur and then Gaussian Blur.

Let's add 0.4 or point 0.5.

0.4 is kind of too much blur.

Let's zoom in.

It's kind of too much.

Let's go for 0.3.

What do you think?

0.3 is something acceptable.

Hit OK and zoom out.

Wow, that is way better.

Now, here comes an optional step.

You can leave it at that if you want to.

However, if you want to take it a step further, if you want to add some realism to it, we

need to do something real.

So, let's create a new layer and in this layer, we're going to take a realistic pencil brush

and just add some outlines to the image.

On the new layer.

You can just name it Pencil Outline, zoom in to the image.

With the brush selected, make sure the foreground color is black, and now change the brush to,

I'm going to choose Dry Media brushes.

Select the first one - KYLE Ultimate Pencil Hard.

If you're CC member, you can always download these brushes for free from Adobe's website.

Adobe already comes preloaded with these brushes.

Now, what we have to do is to just zoom in and draw the outlines.

But, if I draw the outlines in here, it's going to be darker than the sketch.

We don't want that to happen.

So, here is what we do.

Let's go back and then, before you sketch anything, hold the Alt or Option, click on

the line between these two layers - Pencil Outline and the Subject.

Now this is clipped.

Now, whenever you paint something on it, it's never going to be darker than the subject

sketch.

So, let's zoom in and just simply add some outlines to it.

Nothing difficult here.

You can increase the Flow if you want to.

I'm going to keep the Flow at somewhere about, let's try 100%.

Let's see what kind of effect it yeilds.

100 is nice.

Let's make the brush a little smaller.

If you're wondering how did I rotate it, just hold the 'R' key, rotate it.

Then when you release the 'R' key, it gets back to the Brush.

If it doesn't get back to the Brush, you can always press the 'B' key for the brush tool.

If you're having difficulties drawing the lines, you can also do this, you can temporarily

turn off the Gaussian Blur and the Filter Gallery.

And then you can just follow along and now you can get back to the pencil outline, and

then just draw the outline accordingly.

Now, let's turn on the Gaussian Blur and the Filter Gallery and see how that Looks.

Wow, that looks wonderful, doesn't it?

Now, let's do the other areas which are left out at the bottom.

I'm going to turn them off again to see the lines and get back to the pencil outline layer.

I think you don't have to do that so far.

So let's take the eraser and erase this.

It's kind of too much.

We don't need it.

Up to this point, I guess, up to this point, it's fine.

And it's okay.

Now let's take the Brush back again and just draw that as if it was drawn with a real pencil.

This is fantastic.

Now, let's just complete these outlines.

Now, I think it looks pretty okay.

We can totally stop at that.

But, you can take all the time in the world to sketch all the intricacies of this picture.

But if you zoom in, have a look at this, some of the lines outside are going outside the

page.

No problem at all.

We are going to the select the Subject layer, click on the Mask button and take the Brush,

take a soft brush in the General Brushes, just take a soft round brush and erase those

off.

With black as the foreground color, you can just erase them off.

Leave some, you don't have to erase them all.

Just the ones that are out of the page.

So, erase them and we are good to go.

Have a look at this.

Isn't this looking wonderful?

So there you go, a quick and easy way to convert your photos to a simple pencil sketch in Photoshop.

Just a quick little recap.

We used two concepts here.

Number 1, the Blend Mode - Multiply.

The Multiply Blend Mode hides everything which is 100% white and only darkens.

With the help of the Multiply Blend Mode, we were able to bring the texture of the paper

in the white areas.

Now, to bring the texture in the dark areas, we used Blend If.

The second thing that we used in here, the second major thing, was the Graphic Pen filter.

So, simply go to Filter Gallery and Graphic Pens.

Do check out the other filters as well.

There are some really cool filters.

I hope this video helped you and if it did, make sure to give us a like and also don't

forget to subscribe and not just subscribe, ring the bell so that you don't miss any other

future tip, trick or tutorial.

Thank you so much for watching.

I'll see you guys in my next until then stay tuned and make sure that you keep creating.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai