Published: June 16, 2006
By Deke McClelland

In my capacity as a Photoshop expert, people ask me a lot of questions: "Where's the bathroom?" "Do you work here?" and my favorite "Who is your supervisor?" But the most popular question of all is this: "How do I turn a photograph into a piece of line art?" It seems people see line drawings in the Wall Street Journal or on Barnes and Noble bags and assume Photoshop deserves the credit. After all, these drawings are photo-realistic, and photo-realism means Photoshop.

Although Photoshop may play a hand in the refinement of the source photos and adjustment of the final art, the line drawings in question are hand-drawn, each the product of an artist or engraver making the most of traditional tools and natural talents.

But let's say you want to achieve a similar effect without all that hard-wrought experience and manual labor. If you have $250 lying around, Andromeda Software sells a collection of filters called Artistic Screening Tools that let you create credible engraving effects. They're great tools, and once upon a time, I would have said they were your only solution. My impression of other techniques was that they looked like what they were: cheesy Photoshop effects.

Thankfully, that's a thing of the past. After a little critical analysis and a lot of creative soul searching, I came up with a slick trick that exploits Photoshop's image enhancement and graphic arts functions. Plus, my trick relies on layers, so you can tweak your line drawing any old time you like. 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 column you'll learn something those talented artists and engravers don't know: How to create a hand-drawn effect in a fraction of the time in Photoshop.

Step One

Open a color photograph. Head shots work best because they usually provide subtle variations in highlight and shadow, volumetric contours, large areas of simple detail, and plain backgrounds. I chose for my subject the portrait of the sneering woman by photographer Joseph Jean Rolland Dubé from the iStockphoto library.

Step Two

This particular line drawing technique marries a basic edge tracing with deep shadow blacks and cross-hatching. The Filter menu provides lots of ways to trace edges, but my favorite for this kind of work is Photocopy. For the most flexible results, we'll apply Photocopy to an independent layer. Press Cmd-J (PC: Ctrl+J) to jump the image to a new layer. Press the D key to set the foreground and background colors to black and white, their default settings. Then choose Filter > Sketch > Photocopy. Set the Darkness value to its maximum, 50. Then raise the Detail value until you get nice thick edges, typically in the neighborhood of 9 for a 300 pixels per inch (ppi) image.

Step Three

To merge the lines with the original color image, choose the Multiply mode from the blend mode pop-up menu in the Layers palette. The filthy dirty result appears.

Step Four

Naturally, you don't want our subject to look like she's rubbed her face in graphite or succumbed to some dreadful 21st-century pandemic, so some cleanup is in order. We'll start with the digital equivalent of a vacuum cleaner, and then we'll do some hand-scrubbing. Choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, enter a Radius of 2.0, and click OK. The result doesn't look any better, but it gives you some gray values that you can trim away with the Levels command.

Step Five

Choose Image > Adjust > Levels. Increase the first Input Levels value to punch the blacks (make them darker), and then decrease the third value to drop out the whites. I ended up setting the first and third Input Levels values to 115 and 140. Click OK to accept the change. This step results in a much cleaner image, but not clean enough.

Step Six

Use the lasso tool to select the stray dots and pock marks. Then either delete them or make them invisible with a layer mask. You can also use the eraser tool if you like. You should expect to spend 10 to 15 minutes on this step. Keep just the most obvious edge outlines, as I've done here.

Step Seven

For reasons that will become increasingly evident as you work through the steps, you need to keep the original image around for Photoshop to reference. But as it stands now, the image competes rather fiercely with the black outlines. To lessen its impact, click the Background layer and make a new layer. Press Cmd-D (PC: Ctrl+D) to deselect the image. Then press Cmd-Delete (PC: Alt+Backspace) to fill the entire layer with white. Reduce the Opacity value in the Layers palette to 50 percent to let some of the original image show through.

Step Eight

Now it's time to fill in the shadows with black. You might think this requires painting or selecting, but it doesn't. The approach is a bit more technical, but it's also vastly more automated. Create another new layer and fill it with black by pressing Option-Delete (Alt+Backspace). Double-click to the right of the black layer's name in the Layers palette to display the Layer Style dialog box. Go down to the last slider bar, which is labeled Underlying Layer. Drag the white triangle to the left to force through the lightest colors in the underlying layers. I dragged my triangle until the right-hand value above the slider read 160, meaning that the black covers brightness levels of 160 and darker. That's all there is to this procedure. Click OK to exit the dialog box.

At this point, we have something that vaguely resembles a line drawing traced in velum over a photograph. The effect is okay, but to my eyes, it still looks too much like Photoshop art. Next issue, I'll show you how to bring in the cross-hatching that sells the effect as a mechanical engraving. And won't you be amazed when you see how you can adjust the coverage of the cross-hatching on the fly and add pattern layers as you see fit. For novices and advanced users alike, it really is a wonder to behold.

Step Nine

To form the cross-hatch effect, you need to establish a couple of repeating diagonal line patterns. I created two simple images (magnified to 800 percent) using the pencil tool. Both images are tessellating tiles, meaning they repeat seamlessly when expressed as a pattern. (You can test such things using Filter > Other > Offset. Select the Preview check box, change to numerical values to anything but 0, and see if the tile repeats properly.) Notice that one pattern is a flipped version of the other; the right lines are thicker than the left. To define the tiles as patterns, choose Edit > Define Pattern for each image. I named the left-hand pattern Thin Lines and the other Thick Lines.

Step Ten

Return to the layered photograph file and make sure the solid black layer (the one below the Photocopy effect) is active. Then go to the half-black, half-white icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and choose the Pattern command. Select the Thin Lines pattern. If necessary, scale the pattern to better fit the image. For the best results, scale the pattern by an even fraction (50 percent, 25 percent, and so on) and keep the pattern as large as possible. Remember the lines have to print without filling in, so a bit too big is just right. (I scaled the pattern to 50 percent.) Click OK when you're done.

Step Eleven

To integrate the pattern lines into the artwork, double-click in the empty area to the right of the pattern layer's name in the Layers palette. This brings up the Layer Style dialog box. Set the Blend Mode option to Multiply to drop out the whites and keep the blacks. Then use the Underlying Layer slider to taper the lines into the photograph. I dragged the white triangle so the right-hand value read 180. Then I pressed the Option key (PC: Alt) and dragged the right half of the white triangle so the values read 180 / 240. As a result, the lines gradually dissolve into transparency across the very lightest colors in the image. Click OK to accept your changes.

Step Twelve

Press Option-left bracket (PC: Alt-left bracket) to move one layer down. Or, if you prefer, click the solid black layer in the Layers palette. Again click the half-black half-white icon at the bottom of the Layers palette, choose the Pattern command, and select the Thick Lines pattern. Scale the pattern by the same percentage as before (in my case, 50 percent) and click the OK button. The figure here shows my progress so far.

Step Thirteen

In the Layers palette, double-click to the right of the newest pattern layer's name to bring up the Layer Style dialog box. As before, change the Blend Mode setting to Multiply. Then adjust the white Underlying Layer slider triangle to taste. I chose to Option-drag (Alt-drag) the white triangle so the pair of right-hand values read 190 / 220. Then I clicked OK. Whatever your settings, Photoshop merges the opposite line patterns to create a cross-hatch effect.

Step Fourteen

You can stop now and leave the cross-hatching set against a lightened version of the color photograph. But presumably, you want to convert the entire graphic to black-and-white. It might seem like you could just set the Background layer to white and be done with it. However, thanks to the Underlying Layer settings, the behavior of the cross-hatching depends on the colors in the photograph.

Here's the better way: Click the top layer in the Layers palette to make it active. Then click the half-black, half-white icon at the bottom of the palette and choose the Threshold command. Adjust the Threshold Level value to create the ideal balance of blacks and whites. Then click OK.

Step Fifteen

At this point—at any point—you can adjust the Underlying Layer settings applied to the pattern layers to finesse the cross-hatching. In my case, I double-clicked to the right of the Thin Lines layer and dragged the two halves of the white slider triangle so the right-hand values read 225 / 255. After clicking OK, I double-clicked to the right of the Thick Lines layer and changed its slider values to 180 / 240 and clicked OK again. The point is that the cross-hatching settings remain forever editable.

I finished things off by adding some text in back of the Threshold layer, so as to maintain the sharp transitions between black and white. I also threw in a vector graphic of a plate-glass bullet hole (courtesy of iStockphoto), which I pasted into my composition as a shape layer to complete my illustration.

If you want more definition, add more line patterns. I used a series of six line patterns, five of various widths at a 45-degree angle (that is, down and to the right) and one at a 135-degree angle (down and left). For the best results, make sure each pattern layer employs lower Underlying Layer slider values than the one above it. If you're anything like me, once you sink your teeth into this technique, you're going to have a field day.

Deke McClelland is a popular expert and lecturer on Adobe Photoshop and the larger realm of computer graphics and design. He serves as host to the interactive "Best of Photoshop" CD that ships with Photoshop, and he has written more than 70 titles (including Photoshop Bible and Photoshop 7 for Dummies) translated into 25 languages, with 3 million copies in print. One of the most award-winning writers in the business, Deke has received a total of seven honors from the Computer Press Association. He is an Adobe Certified Expert, a member of the PhotoshopWorld Instructor Dream Team, and a contributing editor for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines. In 2002, Deke was inducted into the National Association of Photoshop Professionals Photoshop Hall of Fame.

Copyright © 2006 Type & Graphics, Inc.

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