May
07

Turning your photo into a sketch, and the High Pass Filter

Posted by DeAnna Allan

I was checking out the May photo a day challenge gallery of photos on Jessica Sprague’s website (which is a great website, by the way, but that is another post altogether!), and I saw a couple of pics that looked very different by kimi boo. She had turned her photos into a sketch using Photoshop. Cool! I checked out her blog, on which she has some great challenges called Kimi’s Kreative Homework. I loved the sketch homework she had recently posted, and thought I would try it out. You’ll see my original photo, and the sketch photo. I think they are very cool! Here is the link to the instructions.

Then, I also noticed another photo she had submitted using the High Pass filter in Photoshop. I did a little more investigating and found that the high pass is another form of blur removal, but is easier to use than the Unsharp Mask filter because it can easily be tweaked. You can also use Smart Sharpen (see this link for a quick tour of the Smart Sharpen filter). I really like the effect the High Pass has. Here’s a quick tutorial of what I did (using Photoshop CS3):

I opened a photo that I loved, but had a bit of blurring (in this case it was around the edges of the flower, but the inside was in focus).
Duplicate the layer
Go to Filter-Other-High Pass (the layer will turn grey)
Play with the radius until just the edges of the items in the photo are highlighted (see inset)

Click OK
On the same layer, change the blending mode to Hard Light (you can play with these as well, but generally it works best with Hard Light)
Play with the opacity to your preferences. On mine, I have kept it at 100%.