Colored Pencil Effect

In this tutorial, we'll be turning a regular image into a colored pencil portrait (nuff said)!

(click me for high-res copy)

Image published with permissions by the author, Jackson Hines; http://www.atomicstud.com

Step 1

First things first, you want to copy the background layer by dragging the image onto the new layer icon or by pressing command/control+J on the keyboard. Create a new fill/adjustment layer by pressing the half black/half white circle and then selecting curves and then select the preset medium contras. Hit OK.

Step 2

We need to merge the curves layer and Layer 1" so hold down control/command and select both layers like the image on the left and then press command/control + E to merge the two layers like the image in the middle. Copy our new "Layer 1" and rename it "Edges" and it should look like the image on the right.

Step 3

With the "Edges" layer selected, go to Filter > Blur > Smart Blur and you want a Radius of 30-40, Threshold of 75-85, Quality of High, and a Mode of Edge Only and then you want to immediately invert the colors by pressing command/control+I. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with a radius of 1.0-1.4 to smoothen out the black lines and then set the blending mode the multiply.

Step 4

Duplicate by pressing command/control+J the Edges layer and rename it "Pencil Edges" and go to Filter > Artistic > Smudge Stick and set all values to 0. Why 0 you might ask? We want the general effect with the loss of quality like we would have if we had a stroke length and intensity.... Go to Filters > Artistic >Film Grain and set the Grain level to 2-4, Highlight Area to 0 and Intensity to 0. Go to Image > Adjustments > Auto Levels or you can press shift+command/control+L.

Step 5

Go to "Layer 1" and highlight it... Go to Filter > Artistic > Paint Daubs with a Brush Size of 8-10, Sharpness of 0, and a Brush type of Wide Blurry. Now go to Filter > Artistic > Film Grain with a Grain of 9, Highlight Area of 3, and Intensity of 1... Now we need to go back to Filters > Artistic > Smudge Stick with all values set to 0 but the stroke length which is 8 or 9. And finally.... finally! We need to visit the infamous Filter > Artistic > Film Grain with a Grain of 2 and everything else 0 which is our second to last image and our result will look like the last image.

Step 6

With the "Layer 1" selected, open a new fill/adjustment layer and bring up Brightness/Contrast and up the Brightness to about 50-70 and the contrast to 10-25 and you could bump up the saturation using command/control+U to about a value of 10 if you wanted =)

And that's it!! You're all done with turning a regular image into a colored pencil illustration!!

(Click for High-Res Final)