This page depicts the process I use to go from a digital photograph to an artistic treatment of the subject. All the techniques can be applied using any of a number of different paint programs on the computer (I use PCs running Windows2000), but I'm constantly on the look-out for alternatives that have a smaller footprint on the hard drive of my laptop. Here's the current toolkit I'm using for these: Fractal Painter 5.0 (very old version, but "classic" - Painter still is the program that has the best feel for drawing on a Wacom tablet.) Stoik Software's PictureMan 4.0 - does just about everything Photoshop does, but takes half the space on the hard drive - built by some Russians. The one advantage it has over PaintShop Pro is that it will read Photoshop 6.0 PSD files.

The steps as shown here are a simplification; there is a lot of back-and-forth work, and in this particular case there were several intermediate attempts which went awry and were thrown out.

Also, somewhere along the line I have to figure out how large I want the final print  to be - and then scale the working image to about half that size at a reasonable dot-per-inch setting. I use S-Spline to do this scaling, and use it once more at the end to scale up to the final print size.
Step 1 

Step One:

We start with a rather dull digital image. The brightness of the lights overhead and reflected in the satellite panel caused the camera to under-expose the rest of the image.
Step 2

Step Two:

The image is cropped, brightened, and then a watercolor filter is applied to accentuate the color areas and abstract the shapes slightly. If the filter causes the loss of too much detail, I keep a version of the original image (prior to the watercolor filter being applied) on a layer underneath, and transparentize the layer above a little, to let more detail from the original image come through.
Step3

Step Three:

The figures needed to be lighter to bring them out more, and to express the whiteness of their clean-room coveralls.  You can either marquee them and apply the brightening, or copy the figures to a new layer, or copy the whole image to a new layer and cut a hole in it. (I usually like to work a change like this on a different layer so I can blend the differences if the effect is too strong.)
Step4

Step Four:

A very soft edged vignette is placed on the next layer.  I usually mark a large oval with a very feathered edge, and then invert the selection so the outer part of the image area is the active selection.  Then fill with white.

The layer is transparentized slightly.
Step 5

Step Five:

To bring the whole panel and its supporting structure to the foreground, I judiciously erase parts of the white vignette.
Step 6

Step Six:

Here's where it's important to have a scaled-up version to work from.  If, from this point on, you are working with too small an image, your "pencil" strokes will be heavy, crude, and not realistic.

A composite produced at any stage beyond step two can be loaded into Painter for the creation of the hand sketch.  Painter has a "clone with tracing paper" system that lets you draw on a washed-out image of the source file.   I usually use the "2B Pencil" brush in Painter.  The size of the "brush" depends on the total size of the image I'm working on.  In this case I was working on a version about 2K wide, so I used a particularly "heavy" tip - about 3.5 pixels.  For screen-resolution images I usually set it to 1.5 pixels.
Step 7

Step Seven:

The sketch is brought in on a final top layer, and transparentized enough to bring the colors out. No special compositing/blending technique is used, just normal blending.

Sometimes, when I see the faded result, I'll go back to the lower layers and increase the saturation so more color comes forward.

©2002 Paul S. Hoffman http://www.digitalspaceart.com/