# How would I achieve this B&W Line Drawing treatment?



## clee01l (Sep 2, 2014)

If in LR Develop, I turn on visualize spots in the Spot removal tool I get this white outlined image.  I would like to achieve this effect as a filter or plugin to permanently alter the image. to this two color line drawing style.  Does anyone have a clue how this might be done?   In PS, I've tried Find edges and Trace Contours.  Neither gets me similar results.


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## Jack Henry (Sep 2, 2014)

Photoshop will do this easily, but that's not your question. In LR, I'm not sure


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## clee01l (Sep 2, 2014)

Jack Henry said:


> Photoshop will do this easily, but that's not your question. In LR, I'm not sure


Actually that is the question.  I can't achieve this effect in PS easily or other wise.  If you can describe the process in PS to duplicate the above, I would appreciate knowing.


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## johnbeardy (Sep 2, 2014)

The key will be to duplicate a layer in Photoshop and switch the new layer's blending mode to Difference. Initially, this will give a black picture because at this point there is no difference between the layers (difference is 0, so 0 brightness value). As you make this top layer different, eg by a little blurring, there are differences between pixels on this layer and the one below, so you get brightness values greater than 0 up to 255.

That's the key. Without playing around, my guess would be to try the above with the emboss filter which creates embossed lines. The bottom layer would have very low values in the filter, the top Difference layer would have much higher values.


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## clee01l (Sep 2, 2014)

johnbeardy said:


> ... my guess would be to try the above with the emboss filter which creates embossed lines. The bottom layer would have very low values in the filter, the top Difference layer would have much higher values.


Thanks John,  I'll give this a try and let you know the results.


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## clee01l (Sep 2, 2014)

I followed John's suggestion (with a different photo) and this is the result


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## johnbeardy (Sep 3, 2014)

Well, I've no idea what that may have been in reality! To make the lines clearer and avoid too much embossed detail, one thing you can do is preparing the picture first with the surface blur filter.

I actually wrote a book on Photoshop blending modes which consisted of lots of "recipes" along the above lines where you use different modes and do things like blurring and inverting layers. I don't keep the recipes in my head, but the huge benefit for me of doing the book was how in how often I resort to blending modes to solve all kinds of problems like this or for graphic effect. They're a powerful but perhaps under-appreciated tool.


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## clee01l (Sep 3, 2014)

Thanks, John for getting me in the right direction.  This was a first effort (a spider BTW).  I'm sure that I can spend some time and achieve better results.


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## hsbn (Sep 19, 2014)

You can try this one:
Filter -> Stylize -> Find Edges
then CTRL + I to invert the image
Add B&W adjustment layer
Use Level to increase contrast and clean up.


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## Rob_Cullen (Sep 20, 2014)

In LR- not exactly what you want, but have a play- 
Set to B&W then fiddle with the tone curve-


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