Figure 4-41 shows what our buccaneer looks like after
our retouching efforts. Thanks to Photoshop, there’s
nary a trace of her fear-producing scar—or any other
blemishes, for that matter. But she still has enough fe-
rocity in her countenance to remind us all that we’ll be
walkin’ the plank if we cross her.Turning a Photograph into a Line Drawing
In my capacity as a (self-proclaimed) Photoshop expert,
one of the most popular questions people ask is “How
do I turn a photograph into a piece of line art?” It seems
people come across line drawings, say, in The Wall Street
Journal or on Barnes & Noble shopping bags, and as-
sume Photoshop deserves the credit. After all, these
drawings are photo-realistic, and photo-realism means
Photoshop, right?
Although Photoshop may play a hand in the refinement
of the source photos and the adjustment of the final art,
most of these drawings are hand-drawn, each the product
of an artist or engraver making the most of traditional
tools and God-given talents. But let’s say you want to
achieve a similar effect without all that hard-wrought
experience and manual labor. This exercise reveals a
technique that exploits Photoshop’s image enhance-
ment and graphic arts functions for just such a purpose.
The result is a flexible—even fun—technique that lets
you turn any photograph into a piece of high-contrast,
photo-realistic art. Over the course of this exercise, you’ll
learn how to create a hand-drawn effect in Photoshop in
a fraction of the time it would take to draw it.- Open a color photograph. Head shots
work best for this technique because they
usually provide subtle variations in high-
light and shadow, volumetric contours, large areas
of simple detail, and plain backgrounds. So open
the file Attitude.psd in the Lesson 04 folder inside
Lesson Files-PsCS5 1on1. This portrait of a sneering
woman in Figure 4-41 (on the facing page) by pho-
tographer Joseph Jean Rolland Dubé comes from
the iStockphoto library.
Figure 4-40.
116 Lesson 4: Retouch, Heal, and Enhance