Transform Photos to Pencil Drawing Quickly in Photoshop

I’m showing you the fastest way you can make a photo look like a pencil drawing in Photoshop. Let’s open the photo we want to show as a pencil drawing. Let’s duplicate this photo from the layers panel either with Ctrl + J or drag the background layer onto the new layer.

Thus, we duplicate the photo. I’m changing the name of this layer we just created. Since I want it to appear as a picture, I change it to a picture or you can change it to a drawing. Then right click on this layer we copied and select Convert to Smart Object.

Since we want to show it as a pencil drawing work, we will need to convert the photo to black and white. We’ll do it by reducing the Saturation property. I click this icon. I choose the Hue Saturation option. When I select it, you will see colors like this in the Properties panel. If this properties panel is not visible to you, make sure the Properties option at the bottom of the Window is checked. So it will appear.

And I am moving to a Saturation part to the left. I select the layer we copied and change it to Color Dodge from Blending settings. Now we will need to Invert, let’s press the shortcuts Ctrl + I. Here you will see invert or take it back, under the Image menu I choose the Invert option under Adjustments. You can see the shortcut here. Again, the Invert feature has been edited here.

As a final step, we will give blur effect. So it will look like a pencil drawing work. I choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Such a panel will open. You can reach the desired drawing style by playing with the value of this panel. Let’s start a little low. Let’s increase it gradually. At first, it looks like a fine pencil drawing. When I increase it a little more and reveal its shadows, it will look like a more realistic drawing.

There is no need exaggerate. As you increase the blur ratio according to your photo, it will continue to look like a photo. We can leave it the way it looks to our eyes. It has to look like a drawing of course, and by clicking, OK, we have prepared our image. If you don’t like this, we can redo the settings by double clicking on Gaussian Blur, as we have converted it to a smart object. This is one of the nice features of smart objects. When we examine the image, we can see that it looks like a pencil drawing.

Of course, it would look much better without the background. I paint the background white quickly and we can see the pencil drawing effect like this. It will give much better results in isolated photos, cleared photos with the background removed. That’s it for this video I showed you how we can convert photos into a pencil drawing view. I showed you this with the fastest method.