How to make a photograph of a bird look like an Audobon drawing

[RAB123]

I've tried all the filters and some of them are nice, but the level of detail isnt there and none of them are marked "Audobon Filter". I am looking for an effect that is photo realistic but has the contrast and type of detail found in a drawing. 

[D Fosse]

Keep in mind that these are hand-drawn illustrations completely without any lighting effects. Direct sunlight - any kind of lighting - ruins it immediately. The drawings are not "realistic" at all; they just create an illusion of realism through the level of detail.

So even if you found a filter that works, it would only work on shots taken in absolutely neutral light. Not even overcast; fog or mist would be better.

[RAB123]

good point thanks, as long as we are tweaking even just a little, to give it the slightest non-digital look, that helps

[Nancy OShea]

To get the best results, you'll need to apply multiple passes with several layers and filters. 

Maybe this will help get you started.

https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/sketch-photoshop-effect--cms-27461

This tutorial by Jesus Ramirize describes how to convert a photo to a line drawing.

[J E L]

It's not going to be easy, depending on the level of perfection required, especially if you can't reshoot the subjects in corresponding conditions as @D Fosse recommends. Just a wild guess, but you might start with a simple match color and then do some other selection corrections to change various areas to better fit the mood. Have you researched any third-party actions or filters that are geared for this effect?

[RAB123]

thanks, the color should be modern but yest muted to the tones of watercolors - somewhere in between

[Nancy OShea]

I've never used it but this 3rd party Sketch Action might be what you're looking for.

https://elements.envato.com/sketch-photoshop-action-U9WC5A?_ga=2.248298439.1938113321.1638563417-180...

[D Fosse]

Two of those images will never work. They are very good photos in themselves - but they have strong directional sunlight that immediately disqualifies them for any "Audobon"-effect.

The third, the heron, might work, but you'd still have to do some preliminary work to even out the light.

The importance of lighting is almost always severely underestimated.

[RAB123]

thanks that def helps, I have found that photographs that look like paintings, the ones I have seen were done in a studio, had very even lighting and simpler elements.

[Conrad_C]

Have you looked into the Neural Filters? Below is an quick example of combining the Style Transfer and Color Transfer filters. Style Transfer lets you load an image to use as a style example to apply to the image, and Color Transfer is similar but concentrates on the colors. What is shown is not perfect or finished but only a starting point; to get exactly what you want is going to require a fair amount of filter tweaking and additional manual retouching and compositing. And it will require even more manual intervention if the lighting of the original photo is different than the artistic lighting of the drawing.

Another thing that will require manual intervention is that you probably want some, but not all, of the aspects of the sample drawing. If the drawing has plants and an empty background, but the photo has a different background with no plants, the Neural Filters will try to transfer attributes that may not work well in the photo. If you want the result to have the same empty background as the drawing, you will probably need to mask off the subject from the background first (using Select Subject, Select and Mask, etc.), and you will probably want to pre-process the example drawing to remove anything you don’t want considered as source content.

Just remember that a human illustrator makes a lot of selective decisions about what to include and exclude and what to emphasize in a scene, and these are things a camera never does. These complications are why it’s so hard to build a filter that makes a photo look exactly like a good illustration by a human.

[RAB123]

I will give those a try, thanks