Any of you have any experience with akvis "sketch" plugin? I've been playing it with it, and I made this last night...I'd like to figure out how to make it better. Also, on the original image, the lighting on the stage is very yellow, and I used the flash, so it was somewhat hard to balance those out. Also, I don't really like their pose either, but I dont know what I would change. I am NOT a professional by any means...this is a picture I took for fun for my lady friend (far left) and I'm trying to learn and get better. Thanks for your help...camera is a nikon d300...the three ladies are a singing group (opera) and the guy in the front is their manager/pianist...

original image:




Sketch:

 

That plugin did not do kind things to the lady in the middle!

I've never used it before, but have you tried converting the image to B&W first? I don't think color is going to add anything to the effect. Also, if there are any settings to make the sketch lines finer and for it to be less drastic on the contrast, that would help.

 

I wonder if lowering the sharpness would help the conversation with the ladies faces. Maybe toning down the contrast as well would help. I think this would be great for architecture.

 

Effects like this are fairly easy to produce in PS CS3 without the need for any plugins. You do, however, need a decent working knowledge of layers and blending modes. As Dan alluded to, using black and white is the key. The basic steps for the technique I use are:

1) Duplicate the background layer
2) Create a B&W adjustment layer
3) Merge your layers “up” (shift+cmd+opt+E | shift+ctrl+alt+E) so that you have an actual raster layer of your B&W work and not just the adjustment layer
4) Apply a filter from either the artistic, brush strokes, or sketch categories to the B&W layer you just created
5) Take the duplicate background layer and drag it to the top
6) Change the blend mode of the background layer copy you just moved (overlay or soft light are usually best)
7) Tweak the opacity of the background layer copy and/or the B&W layer with the filter effect as you like

 

Any chance you could do a quickie with my original so I could see the differnce? Plugins work for people who really dont know what they are doing (me) but I do want to learn though how to actually work better within photoshop.

 

Here's a 30-second crack at it:




The technique I used is almost identical to what Billiam posted.

 

BTW, Dan's not exaggerating when he said 30 seconds. Once you know what you're doing with the layers, it takes no time at all to run through the manual process. You'll spend 10x longer just browsing and playing with the filter effects than you will actually applying the effect to your image.