Recently while working on some renders of Bryce models which I am actually using for my business, I worked out a couple of very quick tricks with Photosohop which I thought I would share.

None of this is new to anyone with much experience with Photoshop, but I thought I would post these because they are so simple and quick and provide such dramatic results so easily.

What I wanted to do was render a object so that it had a lot of radiosity but also had the feel of a colored line drawing. So I combined two hackneyed Photoshop tricks and arrived at the above result.

I started with an image I rendered in Bryce using a light half dome to fake radiosity.

Then I softened the image using an old trick usually employed on portraits:

1. Copy the image into a new layer.
2. Ctrl-Alt-~ to select certain values of that layer.
3. Select inverse
4. Delete
5. Filters/Blur/Gaussian with a radius of 4
6. Set the layer to Darken (or whatever looks best for you)

Then to give it the feeling of a sketch, make another copy of the background layer and put it on top.

1. Ctrl-Alt-~ to select certain values of that layer.
2. Delete
3. Filter/Stylize/Find Edges
4. Set the layer to Soft Light

Then I made a silly drop shadow just for this post.

I will be using images like this one on a Website to illustrate actual products (the image above is a WIP). I have converted these steps into saved actions.