Convert Architectural Photos to Draft / Sketch Drawing in Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial, I’m going to talk about a quick way to make architectural images look like drafts. I’m going to show this with two architectural images. Make sure that the photos you add to the scene are smart objects. If they are not smart objects, you can make this layer a smart object by right clicking on the layers and clicking Convert to Smart Object.

First let’s determine the counters of the image through filters. Let’s choose Filter > Stylize > Find Edges. To start with, we have found the outlines, but drafts are made with a single color. So we need to make these colored areas black and white. Of course, there are many ways to this. We can click on the Adjustment button and select the Black and White option. So the colored areas on the photo will be in black and white.

Now let’s add a paper texture, a paper pattern to the background to make it look like a sketch. If you search for a paper texture on Google, you will find many similar images. Let’s change the blend mode of this paper texture to Multiply. When I change it to Multiply, it will show us the dark areas of the layer behind it. So it’ll look like it was drawn on paper. If you want to lighten the color of this paper texture we found on the internet, you can select Levels or Brightness and Contrast from the adjustment button. When we select Levels, you can edit the colors of the paper in this way.

Now let’s assign a color to this image. Let’s assign Solid Color, maybe a light blue color. I close this window by clicking the Okay button. Now we will change the blend mode of this layer and the color layer we just created. I change it to Screen and let’s lower the Opacity value of this layer a little bit. As you can see 100% is too much blue. If we make it 50%, at least it looks much more suitable for the pencils used. At least it looks much more aesthetic than the blue at 100%. When we examine the work closely, especially the outlines of these architectural areas really look like a sketch. We can even make this color 25%. I set the Opacity value to 25%. It’s not quite black, not quite blue. It looks like a color in between. And finally, let’s add Brightness and Contrast here and increase the Contrast value a little bit. Of course, it depends on your preference. It depends on the texture of the paper you use in the background and the architectural photo. You don’t have to do it this way. You can do it however it looks good to your eye. This is what our work looks like in this photo.

If you remember at the beginning of the video, I mentioned another example photo. Let’s go through it now. Since we have already done most of the things we need to do here, we can quickly make this image look like a sketch. First of all, I’m going to remove this layer. We have an image like this. And what were we doing with this image? Filter > Stylize > Find Edges. So that only the outlines of this image are visible. Look, I don’t need to do anything else right now because we have already done everything that needs to be done in the previous example.

We can just play around with it. For example, let’s make the paper texture invisible. See, it looks very different without the paper texture or we lighten the color a little bit with Levels. If I make these levels layer invisible, it’ll look much more effective in this image. This is how we can make architectural photos look like sketch.