>> Mac OS X 10.6.6+
>> SketchMee 1.4+
>> a photo to work with
>> 15 Minutes
Difficulty: Easy
Even basic phones have cameras these days. Add to that a profusion of inexpensive, high-quality printers, and photographs are everywhere.
In many homes, people are swapping traditional paintings for personal snaps. But with myriad photos demanding your attention from dawn to dusk, it’s easy to become wearied by them and yearn for something a little more creative and natural. Yet you also don’t want to remove pictures of those you care about from your walls and mantlepiece. What to do?
SketchMee is a fun and simple-to-use solution to these problems. It enables you to take any photo on your Mac and apply natural filters to it. The result is an image that looks sketched in pencil or crafted in chalk. It would be naïve to suggest that SketchMee is a replacement for having a real-life artist create such a piece of work, but to our eyes it’s not a bad alternative -- especially when it costs the price of a sandwich and a drink. And because the application has a number of settings, that means you can retain an image and still experiment with how it looks, thereby keeping pictures within reach, which are always fresh and unique.
On the following page, we run through the process of using SketchMee, from initial photograph through to cropped output. As always, when it comes to working with images, we strongly recommend you use copies of your treasured digital photos, to avoid accidentally overwriting an original.
In iPhoto, any photo can be duplicated by clicking it and selecting Photos > Duplicate. Alternatively, just drag a photo to a Finder folder or your desktop to make a copy; and for images already in Finder but not also stored in iPhoto or elsewhere, File > Duplicate will result in a copy that you can use.
SketchMee is available from the Mac App Store, for $7.99. There’s also a "pro" version that costs $39.99, which enables larger exports, the option to isolate pencil stroke layers for manipulation in Photoshop, PDF export support, and more. However, for most people (and for our purposes here) the standard version should be more than suitable.
of 7
