Make a photo into a sketch

Kind of a fun trick in photoshop... this has been done many ways many times... but I will give my take on it here. Open an image and make a copy with command J.
Hit the layer style - Color Dodge and then hit command I (for invert)
  Sometimes you will think your image has disappeared here... keep going.
Then on that same layer, select gaussian blur and go medium on that blur.
Come back to layer and choose to desaturate with the hue/saturation slider.
  That's generally where you would be done.

But if you want to try something fun... try motion blur instead of gaussian.  It will give you darker lines.  In addition, you can create a layer from visible layers (as layer 3 in the example is).  And you can then try giving it an effect, like accented edges or something else from the effects menu.

One more thing I tried was to create a layer mask and give the mask a gradient so that I could see through to my original as shown below.  Enjoy. 

Pick of the day:

October Family Shots

A friend of mine likes to cook with his dad. He told me once about something they like to do. If they like a certain dish at a restaurant, they will try at home to replicate the dish with what they have. So that is what I like to do as well. I see a picture, study it, and try to replicate it with my consumer set-up.

I have eye bolts in my ceiling above my kitchen table... I know... weird. But they hold the sky chairs that we use when watching a movie. So I took an old rod that my wife used to use for hanging clothes in our extra room (now a bedroom) and hung a twin sheet from the eyelet bolts. I then placed an SB600 flash pointed into a reflector umbrella directly behind the white sheet. I also placed a shoot-through umbrella on the other SB600 pointed 45 degrees from camera and subject. See the diagram below


Both flashes were set on 1/8 power. My camera was set on Manual (f 4.0 ISO 160 at 1/100sec and auto focus). By the way, I have really become a believer in fully auto focus in lower lighting situations. I have found it has served me well and focuses much quicker than when I try to tell it where to focus.

By the way, these flashes were controlled by the flash on the camera (through Nikon's CLS system). And the camera flash was set down to about 1/128 so that it would be nearly negligible.

And here are the results.





What I would do differently. Get a queen size instead of a twin for larger groups. And something else I have tried was putting a silky material in front of it for a more elegant look.


Pick of the day: I like the warm lighting on the cold snow.