Pencil Sketch
Turn a photo into a pencil drawing, with the shading a real sketch has and not just an outline.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Turn a photo into a pencil drawing, with the shading a real sketch has and not just an outline.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Drop a picture in and it comes back drawn. This is the pencil sketch effect done properly: the whole picture is shaded, the way graphite actually behaves on paper, rather than traced round the edges and left blank in the middle. Two sliders control it, the styles change the medium, and the file you download is rendered from your original at full size instead of from the small preview on screen. Nothing is uploaded, there is no signup, and there is no watermark.
It works on anything, but portraits and pets are what most people convert photos to sketches for, followed by buildings, cars and landscapes, which keep their structure well. If what you want is to change a photograph into something that looks hand drawn, this is the sketch converter for it.
Every pixel is compared with the average brightness of the area around it. Where a pixel matches its surroundings the paper stays white; where it is darker than its surroundings, graphite appears. That is a good description of what a person does when they draw, and it is why the shading comes out in the right places instead of being added as a separate effect.
Older sketch filters, including the one that used to live on this page, ran an edge detector instead. That draws a hard outline round every boundary and leaves everything else blank, so faces come out as a mask of lines with no cheekbones and no shadow. If you have tried an image to sketch converter before and found the result flat and empty, that is almost certainly what it was doing.
Detail sets how far the comparison reaches. High detail compares each pixel against a small area, so only fine texture survives and the drawing is a light hairline sketch, good for hair, fur, foliage and anything already busy. Low detail compares against a wide area, so whole forms darken and the result becomes tonal and moody. Most photographs want somewhere in the middle, and that is where it starts.
Darkness decides how much graphite is on the page. Push it up for a heavy, worked drawing; pull it down for something faint and preliminary. It works as a curve that lifts the paper without weakening the lines, so a lighter setting gives a cleaner white background rather than a washed out sketch.
Under More options, Contrast stretches the tones apart before the drawing is made. A flat, hazy or backlit photo is the usual reason a sketch comes out grey and muddy, and this is the fix. Paper texture adds a fine grain that scales with the picture, so it looks the same in the downloaded file as it does on screen.
| Style | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pencil | Graphite on white paper. Lines plus shading, dark areas left open the way a pencil leaves them |
| Charcoal | The picture's own tone multiplied back in, so dark areas fill in and smudge, deeper and heavier |
| Colour | White paper with strokes in the photo's own colours, a coloured pencil drawing rather than a grey one |
Charcoal is not just pencil turned up. A pencil leaves the paper white in a dark area it has not hatched; charcoal fills it, and that is the difference between the two buttons.
Gifts and prints from a photograph of a person or a pet, profile pictures, tattoo references, colouring pages when Darkness is pulled right down, book and album artwork, presentation slides that need a picture to read as an illustration, and architectural elevations traced from a photograph of the building.
For nearby looks, Threshold Image Filter takes a picture all the way to pure black and white, Posterize Image flattens it into a few solid poster tones, Grayscale converts to grey without stylising anything, and the 8bit Converter goes the pixel-art route instead. The site carries hundreds of other image utilities besides these; see what is live right now on the all tools page.
Open the picture here, then drag Detail and Darkness until it looks right, and download. To convert a photo to a pencil sketch there is nothing to install and no account. The whole thing happens on your own device, so a picture of a person never leaves it. Do several photos one after another if you want a set of drawings; each one keeps its own settings until you change them.
The photograph's tones are bunched together, which is normal for phone pictures taken in flat light. Open More options and raise Contrast, which spreads them apart before the drawing is made. If it looks washed out rather than muddy, raise Darkness instead.
Push Detail to the top and Darkness up. That narrows the comparison to each pixel's immediate neighbours, so only the sharp boundaries survive and the result is close to line art. A true outline with nothing else is a different tool, and this one is deliberately built to keep the shading.
Yes. The page is the same on a phone as on a desktop, and the picture is processed on the device rather than sent anywhere. Large photographs take a moment to save at full size, which is the only part that is slower.
The same as the photo you put in. The preview on screen is scaled down so the sliders stay smooth, but the download is drawn again from your original at its real size, so a 12 megapixel photo saves as a 12 megapixel drawing.
No. The picture is decoded, drawn and saved on your own device, and nothing is sent to a server. There is no account and no watermark.