How to Turn a Photo Into an Illustration in Photoshop

There are great artists among us who can quickly draw anything and everything. Then there are the rest of us, who aren’t as gifted with a paintbrush or pencil. For us, drawing an object or scenery is a chore, if not downright impossible. However, there is hope. With Photoshop, it only takes a couple clicks of the mouse and no more than a minute to turn a photo of an object or scenery into a hand-drawn illustration or a black-and-white line art.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Turning a Photo Into a Hand-Drawn Picture

1. 
    

   Open your photo. Make sure it’s in RGB color mode. Go to "Filter" > "Artistic" > "Poster Edges." This brings up a dialog box with a preview pane and three sliders.

2. Set the Edge Thickness slider at 1 or 2.

3. Set the Edge Intensity slider somewhere around 2 to 5. The higher the number, the more black edges you have in your image.

4. The Posterization slider setting depends on your need and taste. The higher the number, the smoother the transition between different shades of color. The lower the number, the more abrupt the transition, which might be desirable if you are going for a comic-book look. A setting of 3 or 4 usually produces a pretty good result.

Turning a Photo Into Black-and-White Line Art

5. Open your photo. It doesn’t matter if you are working in RGB or CMYK.

6. 
    

   Go to "Filter" > "Other" > "High Pass." This brings up the High Pass dialog box and gives the photo an X-ray look.

7. The Radius setting in the dialog box depends on the size of your image, but generally, you should keep it to under 10, and 5 is often a good starting point. The rule is: the lower the radius setting is, the more details you will end up with in your final image, which may or may not be a good thing. For our test image, which is 375 by 500 pixels, we used a radius of 5.0.

8. 
    

   Go under "Image" > "Adjustments" > "Threshold." You’ll notice that the image now looks like a black-and-white drawing. In you are in RGB mode, dragging the threshold level slider to the left decreases the amount of details in the drawing. Do this carefully, however, since a slight adjustment can lead to huge changes. If you are working in CMYK, you might get an initial image that is mostly black, and dragging the slider to the left will increase the amount of white details shown.

9. 
    

   Adjust the threshold to get your image close to the way you want. Chances are that it won’t remove or keep all the details you want. You can then use the eraser and erase any remaining details that you don’t want to keep. In our example, we erased the leaves in the background.