### Walkthrough : Creating a Settings File If you want to create your own sketch effect this walkthrough will give you a good idea how to go about it. Firstly you need to create the stroke maps you want to use. These need to be greyscale and saved as uncompressed bitmaps. Because these maps can be repeated over the image it's best to make sure they are a seamless pattern. As an example, the following are small sections from the seven stroke maps used in the PenAndInk.sms settings file...
level 1 stroke map | level 2 stroke map | level 3 stroke map
level 4 stroke map | level 5 stroke map | level 6 stroke map
| level 7stroke map |
Once you have created your stroke maps you'll need to save them. Though you can save them anywhere the best place to save them is in the "Stroke Maps" folder where the Sketcher plugin is installed. For example "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop\Plugins\Sketcher\Stroke Maps" or "C:\Program Files\Graphics Programs\Shared Plugins\Sketcher\Stroke Maps This is the default place the Sketcher Plugin looks for files. By saving your sketch maps here, your sketch effects will be easily portable to other systems, making it easier to share effects with others. To set up the effect you want it's a good idea to use a large greyscale gradient image to experiment with, such as something like this at 800x600 pixel resolution... Run the Sketcher plugin, turn off the bumps (set Low Bump and High Bump to 0), and set the contrast values to show the whole raw stroke map data (Contr Start = 100 and Contr End = 0). Disable all the levels except level 1. In level 1, choose the Media File selector and find the stroke map you want to use, such as "PnI1.bmp". Decide at what minimum image intensity you want these strokes to be applied and what level of variation over shade you want based on the source image intensity. For the pen and ink effect level 1 has the following settings Scaling = 34% Min Blend = 0 (white) Max Blend = 100 (black) Trans Start = 100 (when source is white) Trans End = 70 (when source is 70% white) and with Smoothing set to 16, renders like this... This introduces pen strokes from white through to light grey (Trans Start to Trans End). The next level is then created, choosing a different stroke map ("PnI2.bmp"). Level 1 is switched off and level 2 activated, and some settings tried. In this case... Scaling = 37% Min Blend = 0 Max Blend = 100 Trans Start = 81 Trans End = 40 This creates more strokes but only when the source image intensity is darker than white, and with Smoothing set to 16, renders like this... If level 1 is enabled again, the preview shows something like this... For each of the subsequent levels a new stroke map is applied, introducing crosshatched lines in darker areas. With all levels enabled, the end stroke map, without any contrast changes, renders something like this... To create the desired pen and ink look, the contrast needs to be set to render black lines. By setting the threshold high (Contr End = 85), any pixel in the stroke map of lower intensity than 85% will be rendered black. To balance the final image, the other end of the scale (Contr Start) is reduced a little to 97, so that any lighter pixels are rendered white. The result is... which shows different gradation of strokes over the source intensities, good for turning high contrast images into pen and ink illustrations. The small thumbnail doesn't show a clear variation over the lighter tones and it's best to develop effects on larger images. You may also want to experiment on a suitable source photograph with a good dynamic range, to give an idea how the end result will look in a more natural context.