Photoshop pencil portrait

This tutorial will explain the techniques that I use to create digital pencil portraits in Photoshop. I have been doing during these a few years now and have searched a few techniques of how to do it on the web. I changed what I learned giving this tutorial a more precise (and more pleasant) rendering, that I might add.

There are some things that can be made in advance before the photo is taken to help give a more pleasant result. For example, have a white background allows to have a cleaner separation of the object. Also, have the object white porter (or some other coloured) clothing is a big more it helps to draw the Viewer to deal with the person. Although these tips are useful, they are not absolutely necessary.

Okay, let's get started!

1. Open the image in Photoshop.

2. Create a copy of the background layer by pressing ?Control J? on your keyboard. Now reverse the new layer pressing on... ?Control I?.

3. Convert image to ?grayscale? by clicking on (Image)

4 Mode of layer set ?color dodge?... This will make the layer look almost completely white.

5. Now to highlight some of the features of pencil by applying a Gaussian blur. For a 72 dpi image, I use a RADIUS setting 55.

6. Now is the time to use brush (B) on your keyboard and start to paint the unwanted areas of your white of the image. Make sure that reduce you the opacity of your brush for about 20% or more, havernwhite selected as your foreground color and are soft edge with a brush.

7 Now add some subtle shadows for the face, chest, and clothing. To do this, make sure your foreground color is black by pressing (D) on your keyboard. Select your brush and reduce the opacity of your brush (Layer step) to 15%. Now begin to paint all the areas that you feel needs a shadow. In particular, the face. There is really no rules here. Just highlight some shadows that suits you best. This may take a little practice.

8.Now, we will add some highlights to hair. Select white as your foreground color and make sure your brush opacity is 15%. Start brushing of the teeth on the light areas of hair to reveal some highlights. Note that the changes are very subtle. You no longer wish to it.rnrn9.Now that it is time to blend layers and crop the image. Select... Color RGB-Mode-image and select Merge. SELECT (C) on your keyboard to raise the crop tool to crop the image. You can also add a tint of color if you want by pressing on... (U of control) of your keyboard to bring up the Hue/Saturation window. Select color from the right window less and playing with the sliders to get the desired color. That is all there is to it.

About the author: Fabian Barajas is author of several ebook Photoshop tutorials including "" how to create your very own Professional Looking Digital Backdrop! "" Its website includes samples of his work is...

http://www.Digital - .net background.