Pastel Sketching

This weekend I've been working on getting more of my photos ready for selling at an art show. In addition to the many regular photos I've been printing up, I thought it would be cool to do a few stylized ones, where I do a bit more photoshop work to give the image a surreal or non-photorealistic look. I came across some nice actions and instructions. A few really caught my eye, and I'd like to mention one of them.

I was playing around with Isabel's Pastel Sketch action, and really liked the results I got from it. Here's a sketch of the Sand Hills Lighthouse



I started out working with the action, but I really had no idea how it was working or what effect my adjustments were having. I did some digging around and found a post on dpreview from Isabela explaining the technique step by step.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1006&message=11085888

Doing it by hand (rather than through the action) and reading some of her additional explanation really helped me understand what was going on. The action has a ton of extra adjustment dialogs which aren't really necessary for the basic effect. To me, they just confused me further, as I didn't know what effect anything I clicked on was having on the picture.

This is a really nice result. I've tried this trick with a tree pic and a butterfly pic...both came out very cool looking. I'm thinking this effect will look really good printed on a matte or art paper. I'll continue to play with this effect.