Tutorial: AKVIS Sketch

Portrait out of a Newspaper Clipping

Tutorial for AKVIS Sketch by Gordon Sisson.

Sketch offers a unique opportunity to create delightfully unusual graphic effects from ordinary photographs and drawings. I wanted to show a use of the plugin that would be a little different.

I had the transformation of a newspaper clipping from which I created a color portrait of an old friend.

Here is a brief description of the original transformation before I get to the color picture from which I did the AKVIS Sketch magic.

Scanned the photo at 2400 dpi with the descreening filter set for newspaper – 85 dpi. Then applied the Kodak Digital GEM plugin for noise and grain suppression (AKVIS Noise Buster would have been better but it was not yet invented).

Then I enlarged our photo to almost four inches wide and reduced the resolution to 400 dpi. Applied a little bit of focus with Acclaim Software’s Focus Magic plugin, a little bit of surface blur and increased contrast and I had a nice black and white portrait. Much later, with the new AKVIS Coloriage plugin — this picture was the result (like in this tutorial).

Click the image to open its larger copy in a new window

Now I will see what I can do with Sketch!

• Step 1. Call AKVIS Sketch and consider the controls offered, the detailed explanations are very helpful. I will first create a charcoal sketch.

  Choose an angle that suits the graphic elements of the picture. It is best to go with any natural lines such as hair. For this picture, 45 degrees was ideal.

  Adjust the stroke’s size, intensity and hatching based on your own intuition.

  Sketch also provides a sharpen feature which is so important for this type of illustration.

• Step 2. For the charcoal sketch I am seeking, I set the Charcoal slider at 4, Size at 5, Length at 6 & 10, Midtones at 8, and Hatching & Sharpening at 100. Note your settings in case you want to redo.
• Step 3. Press the green arrow run button and you will see the resultin the Sketch window. If you like it, press the green check button and you will be back in your graphics application. Save your work immediately.

  If you want to do something differently, press the red cancel button instead of the green arrow, start again and redo your settings.

Here is the resulting charcoal sketch. A classy rendition of a very ordinary photograph that started with a newspaper clipping.

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Now back to the color photograph to ask AKVIS for a color sketch.

• Step 1. Call AKVIS Sketch and consider the controls offered and their explanations.
• Step 2. For the color sketch we moved the Charcoal slider up to 5 and set Coloration at 100. Set Size at 3, Length at 6 & 10, Midtones Hatching and Sharpen at 100.

  Note your settings in case you want different results and need to rerun the procedure to make adjustments.

• Step 3. Press the green arrow run button and you will see the resultin the Sketch window. If you like it, press the green check button and you will be back in your graphics application. Save your work immediately.

  If you want to do something differently, press the red cancel button instead of the green arrow, start again and redo your settings.

  Here is what you now see in the Sketch window. This is quite a nice result, but not enough of the sketch look for this particular art requirement.

  
• Step 4. Press the green check button to go back to your graphics application. Save your work immediately.

For more of a sketch look, let’s try another AKVIS plugin — Noise Buster.

Noise Buster

• Step 1. Call AKVIS Noise Buster plugin and consider the settings and explanations provided.

  Sharpen Edges is the Noise Buster setting we want for this task. We set fade at 12%, luminance noise at 4 and color noise at 6. We left the smooth levels and blur at 0.

• Step 2. Press the green arrow run button and you will see the resultin the AKVIS window. Press the green check button to return to your graphics application. Save yourwork immediately.

  To accentuate (or exaggerate) the sketch look, we repeated the application of the Noise Buster magic (Sharpen Edges).

Here is the finished sketch, a great victory for AKVIS Sketch plugin with a little help from AKVIS Noise Buster.

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