Turn a photo into a pencil sketch, line drawing or charcoal
This photo to sketch converter redraws any picture as hand-made artwork using the same technique digital artists use in Photoshop and GIMP: the photo is converted to greyscale, inverted, blurred, and blended back over the original with a colour-dodge blend. Flat areas turn paper-white while edges and shadows become graphite strokes. On top of that classic pencil effect you get an ink line drawing built from Sobel edge detection, a darker, smudgier charcoal look, and a coloured pencil mode that keeps the original hues.
The whole conversion runs on your device with the browser’s canvas, so photos of family, documents or clients are never uploaded. Previews are drawn at up to 1,200 px for instant feedback while you move the sliders, and the download is rendered at the photo’s full resolution, capped at 4,000 px on the longest side.
How to use the Photo to Sketch
- Drop a photo on the upload area, click it to choose a file, or paste an image with Ctrl+V.
- Pick a style: Pencil, Ink lines, Charcoal or Coloured pencil.
- Move “Detail” to choose between fine texture (small blur) and soft, broad shading (large blur), and “Line strength” to make the strokes lighter or darker.
- Leave “Paper texture” on for a warm, slightly grainy paper look, or switch it off for a clean grey-on-white render.
- Drag the handle across the picture to compare the sketch with the original, then press “Download sketch” as PNG or JPG.
Photo to Sketch features
Four drawing styles
Pencil (colour-dodge sketch), Ink lines (edge detection), Charcoal (gamma-darkened, softened strokes) and Coloured pencil (the sketch tinted with the photo’s own saturated colours).
Detail and line-strength sliders
Detail sets the Gaussian blur radius from 1 to 30 px, which decides how much texture survives; line strength scales how dark the strokes are drawn.
Paper texture
A deterministic two-scale grain and a warm off-white tint make the result look printed on drawing paper rather than on a screen.
Before/after comparison
A draggable split line and slider show the original and the sketch side by side on the same picture.
Full-resolution download
The preview is downscaled for speed, but the exported PNG or JPG is drawn from the original pixels (up to 4,000 px wide), with the blur scaled to match what you saw.
Drag, drop or paste
Works with JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP files, including screenshots pasted straight from the clipboard.
How the pencil sketch effect works
The classic recipe has four steps, and the tool performs exactly these on every pixel:
- Greyscale: luminance = 0.299 R + 0.587 G + 0.114 B. Transparent pixels are composited on white first.
- Invert: the greyscale image is flipped so dark becomes light.
- Gaussian blur: the inverted copy is blurred with the radius set by the Detail slider. The blur is computed as three successive box blurs, which approximates a true Gaussian closely and runs in the same time whatever the radius.
- Colour dodge: result = grey × 255 ÷ (255 − blurred inverse). Where the original and its blurred inverse agree (flat areas) the division pushes the value to white; where they differ (edges, texture, shadows) grey strokes remain.
Line strength then darkens whatever is not white: out = 255 − (255 − dodge) × (0.4 + 2.6 × strength). The Ink lines style skips the dodge and instead runs a Sobel operator over a lightly blurred greyscale to measure the gradient at each pixel; strong gradients become black lines and weak ones are discarded, giving a clean outline. Charcoal applies a gamma curve to the pencil result, mixes 30% of the original tones back in and softens the strokes. Coloured pencil boosts the photo’s saturation by 60% and lays that colour down only where the pencil drew lines, so white paper stays white.
Getting a good sketch from different photos
- Busy backgrounds turn into scribble; crop to the subject first with the Crop Image tool.
- If the sketch looks washed out, the photo probably lacks contrast — raise it with the Image Contrast tool before converting.
- Noise shows up as pencil grain. Increase Detail, or run the photo through the Image Denoiser first.
- For printing, download PNG; for sharing on messaging apps, JPG at 85–92% quality is much smaller and looks the same.
| Photo | Style | Detail | Line strength |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portrait, soft lighting | Pencil | 10–16 px | 50–70% |
| Portrait for a line tattoo or colouring page | Ink lines | 4–8 px | 70–100% |
| Building, car, product | Ink lines or Pencil | 3–6 px | 60–80% |
| Landscape with sky and trees | Charcoal | 14–24 px | 40–60% |
| Flowers, food, bright clothing | Coloured pencil | 8–14 px | 60–80% |
| Low-light or noisy phone photo | Pencil | 18–30 px | 30–50% |
Photo to Sketch FAQ
How do I turn a photo into a pencil sketch for free?
Drop the photo on this page, keep the Pencil style, adjust Detail and Line strength until the preview looks right, and press “Download sketch”. There is no sign-up, watermark or upload.
Is the photo uploaded to a server?
No. The greyscale, blur and blend steps run in your browser with the canvas API. The photo stays on your device, which makes the tool safe for private pictures and ID photos.
Why does the download look slightly different from the preview?
The preview is drawn at up to 1,200 px for speed. The download is drawn from the full-size photo with the blur radius scaled up to match, so strokes keep the same proportions but show more fine detail. Paper grain is drawn per pixel, so it looks finer on a large export.
What is the maximum photo size?
Any size can be opened. Exports are capped at 4,000 px on the longest side (about 12 megapixels for a 3:2 photo) to keep memory use reasonable on phones; larger photos are scaled down to that size.
Can I make a line drawing or colouring page from a photo?
Yes. Choose “Ink lines”, set Detail low (around 4–6 px) and Line strength high, and switch off the paper texture for a pure black-on-white outline.
Does the coloured pencil mode keep the original colours?
It keeps the hue of every pixel and boosts its saturation, then paints that colour only along the pencil strokes. Flat, bright areas stay paper-white, as in a real coloured-pencil drawing.
Will this work on a phone?
Yes. The page works in mobile Safari and Chrome; the split handle responds to touch, and photos from the camera roll are processed on the phone itself.