Photo to pencil sketch

This is a rebuild: the photograph is remade out of pencil lines on paper. It is a construction from your photo’s tones and edges, not a drawing — no model guesses at strokes, and every mark sits where your photo changes from light to dark.

Three styles share one engine. Pencil is the darkroom trick of colour-dodging a blurred negative over the greyscale. Ink lines is a difference of two blurs that keeps only the edges. Colour sketch lays the pencil over a soft wash of your photo’s colour. If you want flat colour with outlines instead, the cartoon mode is the better door; for a pure edge map, edge detection.

Style

Pencil, Ink lines or Colour sketch.

Line softness / line weight

How wide the blur behind each line is, as a fraction of the picture: soft and broad, or fine and crisp.

Detail (ink)

How faint a tonal step still draws a line.

Darkness and shading

Darkness deepens the graphite; shading lays some of the photo's own tone back under the lines.

Paper texture

A seeded, procedural paper grain multiplied over the result.

• Flat or very dark photos give little to draw: the pencil only marks where tone changes.
• Hair, grass and gravel turn into dense scribble because every strand is an edge. Raise Line softness to calm them.
• It will not look like a particular artist's hand. It is a measured construction, and the page says so.

The strip, the preview and the saved file run the same code on the same settings, with every size a fraction of the picture, so the file you download is the frame you approved.

There's no upload step on this page — your picture is decoded in the tab, drawn to a canvas, and gone the moment you close it. The filter runs in this tab, on your device, and the file is written here too.

Is this drawn by AI?

No. It is a classical construction from your photo's own tones and edges: the greyscale is inverted, blurred and colour-dodged back over itself, so flat areas cancel to paper white and only the places where tone changes leave graphite. No model is downloaded and nothing is invented.

Why do small faces lose detail?

Every line comes from a change in tone, and a face only a few dozen pixels tall has very few changes to draw from — an eye becomes one or two marks. Crop closer before you sketch, or switch to Ink lines and raise Detail so fainter steps still draw a line.

Can I get a colour sketch?

Yes. Choose Colour sketch and the pencil is multiplied over a desaturated, lifted copy of your photo, like a wash under the lines. The Colour slider sets how much of the photo's colour comes through.

Will the saved file match what I see?

Yes. Every blur radius is a fraction of the picture's short side, not a pixel count, so the strip frame, the preview and the full-size file are drawn with the same proportions. The paper texture is seeded, so it lands in the same place too.

What size is the download?

Your photo's own size, as PNG, JPG or WebP. PNG keeps the finest graphite tones; JPG is smaller and fine for sharing.

• Cartoonize a photoFlat colour, a short palette and ink lines — a classical construction, not AI.
• Edge detectA Sobel luminance gradient map with threshold and inversion.
• Black and white filterB&W looks plus a channel mixer with red, orange, yellow, green and blue filters.
• PaintingSmoothed regions, reduced colour steps and measured contour weight.

Rendered on your computer, not on a server.