photo art software

February 3, 2006 7:45 PM

What program (PC) should I use to convert digital photographs into line-drawings? Assuming there is such a program.
posted by Gankmore to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

Do you mean automatically? Or with some user input (aka - can you draw at all?)
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:50 PM on February 3, 2006

As far as I know, there's no easy, automated way to do it that will give you good results everytime. There may be programs or plugins that will attempt to, but because of differences in contrast and sharpness and focus etc. in different photos, you'll never get a good trace without doing some work by hand. Adobe Illustrator or any other vector drawing program are great, because you can draw your lines in with a mouse or tablet, then go back and tweak them using the bezier tool if they're not perfect. Photoshop or raster art programs are going to be more difficult, but it's still doable there, too. There are probably tutorials online for both approaches.
posted by cathodeheart at 8:08 PM on February 3, 2006

I'm not entirely sure what you want. What do you want the final product to look like?
posted by Hildago at 8:11 PM on February 3, 2006

Silhouette is a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator (Mac or Windows) that will convert bitmap images to vector drawings.
posted by Rothko at 8:18 PM on February 3, 2006

you could use GIMP for windows, its free. The only thing to undrerstanding gimp is its wysiwyg so all the options are available when you right click on the image. There also just on the top of the image now in gimp 2 and later. Choose the option filters and try the ones in edge detect, and also artistic - cartoon effect and others will aproximate cartoony stuff. You could use filter - distort - iwarp to warp the image to make it more exagerated and cartoony. You can add more effects (paper, newsprint) together by making several layers (crtl-l, use the layers menu) and setting their modes to something like lighten only. When you want to save just type the dot three letter extension (.jpg, .tif, .psd, .xcf is its native) to decide what type of file to save and follow the prompts, its nice because it will show you what you get while you set the size. Afterwards you could make stickers using filter - map - small tiles and image - scale image to size of a sheet of paper or other stuff, like layer - color - posterize, or setting the image - mode - indexed and choose black and white can get some results
posted by psychobum at 8:25 PM on February 3, 2006

If you don't mind spending a lot of time in Illustrator and Photoshop, you can follow this wonderfully-illustrated set of tutorials.

Personally, I prefer Macromedia for their drawing packages, and Adobe for Photoshop and InDesign. Macromedia Flash is a much better program than Illustrator for the beginner to get started in making/editting their own vector images. When you get comfortable with it, Freehand is a natural next step along the path.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 8:29 PM on February 3, 2006

Another extensive guide (using Photoshop)
posted by smackfu at 8:38 PM on February 3, 2006

What you want is to 1) load the image into Illustrator or FreeHand, then 3) use it as a guide image to draw the line art. If you can't draw, then insert step 2) send it to someone who can draw and have them...
posted by kindall at 9:04 PM on February 3, 2006

Inkscape can turn regular images into vector images, but I believe it can only generate black and white results. It uses potrace to do this... the potrace website has some examples.
posted by gsteff at 9:09 PM on February 3, 2006

CorelDraw comes with a utility that does this fairly well: CorelTrace. They have a 15-day trial up on their site. It's very tweakable, handles colour, and so on. The resulting paths generally need a fair bit of tweaking, but it's much quicker than starting from scratch or handtracing in Illustrator.
posted by bonehead at 9:27 PM on February 3, 2006

i agree with gsteff: inkscape is definitely the tool to try. it's free (in all senses of the word), built on all major platforms, and has an incredible range of tools available in it.

The tracing dialog box alone has a range of different settings which are useful in doing different kinds of bitmap-to-vector conversions (line-art is different than stylized abstractions, for example). I believe it can use autotrace in addition to potrace, but i'm not sure. If not, you may want to also check out autotrace. delineate is another frontend to both potrace and autotrace, but i haven't tried it myself.

Try inkscape, you'll like it!
posted by dkg at 9:38 PM on February 3, 2006

There is a wicked cool program out there that's designed to let you trace bitmaps to a more line-drawing look, if that's what you're after (question is a bit unclear). I don't remember the name, though. :( Anyone?
posted by RikiTikiTavi at 10:16 PM on February 3, 2006

i've never really used illustrator but xara xtreme is a great program that would allow you to trace an image into vectors quite well. it even has a feature(i forget what it's called exactly) that will translate an image into vectors(mostly pretty roughly but definitely a jumping-off point).
posted by tysiva at 11:30 PM on February 3, 2006

Response by poster: Thank you all. I appreciate the input. (Gotta love AskMefi!).

I do realize that I am going to have to do much of the work myself... just wanted to know which porgram would get me there smoothest.

The end result of what I am trying to do is to make simple silk screens from the photo>line-drawings.

Thanks again!
posted by Gankmore at 5:25 AM on February 4, 2006

Are you trying to do something like this?
posted by d-no at 4:37 PM on February 4, 2006