Techniques
Saturday July 1st 2006 .

Geraint James :
Producing a line sketch image.

This method was discovered by Dave Rowley and figures on one of his instructional CDs. It works well with groups of human figures but I have also tried it with animals and architectural images.

1. Open original image & make a copy on another layer.

2. Select the copy layer and desaturate the image.

3. Make a copy of this monochrome image on a 3 rd layer.

4. Use image / adjust / invert to produce a negative of this image on the 3 rd layer.

5. With the 3 rd layer highlighted, change the layer mode to “colour dodge”.

6. This will produce a blank white screen. To produce the line image, use filter / blur / Gaussian blur or motion blur depending on the effect you want to produce.

7. By merging the two mono layers, further work can be done using image / adjust / levels, curves or brightness/contrast. I also like to add some texture using filter / brush strokes / cross hatch or similar.

8. By using a layer mask, some of the original colour image can be reintroduced into the whole or part of the monochrome line image if desired.

At this stage, parts of the background can be erased quite easily.

See images above : donkey-original and Donkey-line image

Other Fine Key Line Techniques from the RPS Digital Imaging Group website Forum - www.Digit.org.uk

Paul Carr 24 Aug 2006
Just come across any easy way for giving images fine key lines using CS2.
Put image on screen go to Image (top line) go to canvas size. when on screen go to New Size and tick "relative box".
At the bottom is a list of colours including access to the colour palette. Just using white and black, select white and then go to width(in new size) and just put in .2 repeat in Height hit ok, and a white bounding box around the shot will occur, then repeat selection of Image, Canvas size,and select black but this time use .1 as the size chosen - this gives a lovely key line effect, and of course you may increase the lines by increasing the .1/.2 as you need, hope this helps someone!

Guy Davies 26 Aug 2006
I don't do anything quite so clever.
All I do is Select All then Edit>Stroke and pick Inside as the option.
I use the clour picker to find a suitable dark colour in the image and darken it if necessary.
I choose a stroke of 2 pixels for images off the D70 (3000 x 2000 px) and 3 pixels for images off the D200 (3872 x 2592 px).
It's important to do it Inside as an Outside stroke has rounded corners.

More techniques are shared on the Digit website and in the RPS DI Group Members magazine "Digit".


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