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Hi All
I need a plugin to convert digital photos into black/white sketches or line drawings this is for professional use so must be very good.
Any advice please

Thanks

Ray Goodwin

A plug-in that comes to mind is Sketcher, http://www.littleinkpot.co.uk/index.htm

I recommend Alien Skin's SnapArt, and not just for sketching either! See this guy's site for much more detailed Snap Art sketch examples.

See the Sketcher interface and examples here.

Hi Ray. The sketching plugins have different styles, and some work better on some photos than on others. So you might find something to like in more than one.

In addition to the plugins others have suggested, I will add AKVIS Sketch. http://akvis.com/en/sketch/index.php. It is not the fastest, but some of use find the results to be more usable than the others.

Also, check FilterForge. http://www.filterforge.com/.
It contains several sketch filters. You might find one or more useful.

See examples and a screenshot of AKVIS Sketch here.

Hi All
Thanks for all your suggestions and comments I will look at them all.
I do use Akvis Sketch at the moment
I wanted to try the four PanosFX plugins called : Old Paper - Sketch Effect - Vintage Photo & Film Machine but can't find them to try anywhere.
If anyone now where you can get them to try please let me know.
Anyway once again Thanks for all the suggestions

Cheers

Ray Goodwin

Those are actions, not plug-ins, and I don't believe there's such thing as a "trial action".

The Panos website is here:

www.PanosFX.com

See this page for his freebies.

I have all his freebies downloaded but they do not seem to include the ones you mention.

Look into the free Filters Unlimited for old photo effects (see the last example on the page).

OldMovie is also great for old-time effects.

These last two items are Windows only.

Ray. I was able to duplicate the result of the Sketch Effect action, using this photo to start with http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/b ... birth.html. I used the Sketch and Color filter in FilterForge. The Sketch and Color filter in Filter Forge is based on a standard Photoshop technique. If you want to try it in Photoshop, here is the basic technique. If you want to try this in Photoshop,

Preprocess: Lighten the photo using the middle slider in Levels set to 1.57.

Technique: Copy background to new layer, desaturate copy, copy desaturated layer to new layer, invert, set to color dodge or linear dodge (whichever makes it pure white), then Gaussian Blur the top layer.

Post Process: Add a Levels layer mask and clip the black point.

Thing is though, it's a pain to do this technique in Photoshop. Actions are easier. So is FilterForge.

Andrew mentioned Filter Forge a couple of times. It's a revolutionary new approach not only for applying premade filters contributed by FF users to the main library, but also for creating your own.

See some examples of my work with Filter Forge here and in issues 8 and 9 of my ezine here.

As a Mac user I run the Windows-only Filter Forge under emulation using Parallels Desktop.

I found an action that does the best sketch and more. It's at www.pencilpixels.com
I just bought it and haven't stopped playing with it since. You might want to try it out too.

http://www.plugsandpixels.com/pencilpixels.html