New toy from the Internet

I love to play with my photos and today I decided on adding a sketch to a perfectly good picture. I spent hours using a filter to create a line drawing from this photo.

To do so I converted to black and white and increased the contrast then brought into use a filter from "Image Skill" called "Outliner". This did a very good job of creating the outline - but outlined all the ripples in the water and leaves on the trees - so I had to spend more time removing all the black from the places I did not want outlines. I was pretty happy with the final image once I had put it over the original image and used "multiply". Then I decided to do a search for other sketch software and downloaded a freebie called FotoSketcher. It does wonderful things and I will show you.

These are two of the effects you can get by using the presets for watercolor and for vintage and further adjustments can be made by sliding the sliders and changing textures. But I digress! I wanted to do a line sketch and put that over the top of a photo. I will show you the sketch and the result.

I wish I could draw as good as this and as fast as this was done!
Next up I copied this "drawing" and pasted it onto the original photo and clicked on "Multiply" in the layers blending options. I found I needed to increase the midtones brightness in the photograph because the black from the drawing in the trees and water made the picture too dark. Here is the result.

The effect of putting a sketch over something with defined edges makes quite a statement. I quite like the effect. It isn't something you would do for every picture but it works really well on photos of architecture. This program does a good job in a fraction of the time it took me with the filter.

There is a downside though. Somehow the program has also managed to hijack my browser and although I de-activated the Fotosketcher tool bar , the web page suddenly sprang back up while I was writing this blog. I will have to so some work on it! Grrr!