Paint Shop Pro Tutorials
Changing photographs to charcoal drawings

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PSP TUTORIALS. CHARCOAL DRAWINGS

Here is an easy way to transform a photograph into a charcoal drawing.

This tutorial presumes you have a basic understanding of PSP. The remaining steps involve the use of layers and gives a valuable lesson on different techniques to the use of layers.

STEP 1

Open up the photograph you want to use. I'm going to use a pic of my daughters first day at school.

First you will need to get rid of unwanted background.

Take your Lasso Tool set at Point to Point and draw around the portion of the pic you want to use.

Copy the selection to your clipboard.
CTRL + C.

Open a New Image with a white background and paste the selection as a New Layer CTRL + L.

Merge the Layers.
Layers || Merge || Merge All

STEP 2

Duplicate the Background Layer.

Bring up the Layers Palette, (click on the Layers Toggle Palette Window ) right click on the background Layer selection and click Duplicate.

STEP 3

Set the Blend Mode on the Top Layer to Darken.

STEP 4

Give that Layer a Gaussian Blur. You can play around with the opacity at this stage. An opacity radius of between 5 and 10 seems to work best. We will use the in between number of 7 for this tutorial..

Effects || Blur || Gaussian Blur
Opacity = 7

STEP 5

Duplicate the Blurred Layer, the one set to Darken, and change the Blend Mode on the New Layer to Difference.

That sure does make a difference.

STEP 6

Now go to Colors || Greyscale

STEP 7

Layers || Merge || Merge All (Flatten)

STEP 8

Colors || Negative Image

STEP 9

Duplicate the top layer and set the Blend Mode to Multiply, to make the image darker.

You can now duplicate that layer as many times as you wish, to make the image as dark as you want.

Looks great! Merge all your layers and save as.