By Prof. Jose R. Buitrago, assistant professor, University of Georgia School of Environmental Design

Fig. 1

Just to review, importing an Auto CAD drawing into Adobe Photoshop CS2 as a PDF file format lets you take full advantage of the rendering capabilities that Adobe Photoshop CS2 offers. Start by launching Adobe Photoshop CS2. Under File menu, select Open and browse until you find your Adobe PDF drawing, hit the OK button. The Import PDF pop menu window will open. There, on Select, choose Page, Thumbnail?EUR??,,????'??+Size Fit the page, Crop to?EUR??,,????'??+Bounding Box, Resolution to 300 dpi or larger, Mode to RGB, and Bit Depth to 16 bit. Hit OK. See Fig. 1.

Fig. 2

Your drawing should carry the same paper size dimensions of your CAD drawing. If not, under the top menu option Image, select Canvas Size and match the canvas size to the size of your original drawing. There?EUR??,,????'???s always a small percentage distortion in changing the AutoCAD file into a PDF and then into Photoshop CS2. This is normal but should be almost unnoticeable to even the trained eye.

Fig. 3

The imported PDF drawing should show in the layer menu as standard Layer 1. Depending on your Photoshop default setting, your background should be either white or transparent. Now you can take full potential of the different rendering techniques available on Adobe Photoshop CS2: blue print, sepia print, water color, pastel, color pencil, black pencil, green/black board chalk rendering, Prismacolor markers, air brush, and many others.

To accomplish the ?EUR??,,????'??marker?EUR??,,????'?? rendering feel, start with a crisp white background and keep the CAD line drawing layer in black line. Make sure that the background layer is on the bottom of the layer management menu window, color rendering layer is the middle layer and black line layer is on the top of the list. This will ensure that the black lines will not be covered by the color render. See Fig. 2.

Fig. 4

Make the color rendering layer the active layer. Next, select the brush tool. Click to open the Select Tool Preset Picker and choose the marker medium tip. This option is the closet to the traditional broad chisel soft tip of a color marker. Click to open the Brush Tool Preset Picker and change the size of the marker tip to match the actual size of a real marker chisel tip (about +/- ??EUR??,,????'??). Use the ruler on top or side of the document page as a guide to get an approximate size. Also, change the opacity of the brush-marker tool to 50 percent. The next step is to select your color choice from the Color Pickler box, and hit OK. See Fig. 3.

Fig. 5

Experiment first with different angles and strokes. The idea is to create the feel of the marker, so getting a perfect solid color is not the goal. Try leaving white gaps between angle strokes and overlap the same color over and over to get a darker tone and value. There is no wrong and right in this technique since we are trying to recreate the feel of a ?EUR??,,????'??hand ?EUR??,,????'??? not perfect ?EUR??,,????'??? rendering?EUR??,,????'?? media. Do not hesitate in creating more ?EUR??,,????'??Color Render?EUR??,,????'?? layers. This will allow you to overlap one layer over the other, thus preventing one layer screening the other by accident. Uses the eraser to clean some of the overspills created by the marker strokes, or use the marquee tool to isolate specific areas to be rendered. See Fig. 4.

Fig. 6

Ones you reach the desired ?EUR??,,????'??marker rendering?EUR??,,????'?? feel. Save the drawing as an active Adobe Photoshop drawing and also save a copy as the ?EUR??,,????'??final drawing.?EUR??,,????'?? The last one is the copy that you need to flatten all layers to create one simple drawing. See Fig. 5. The first one you keep as a back up copy, in case that further revisions are needed.

It is extremely encouraged to print your drawing using Adobe PDF as well. This will turn the drawing into an easy format to print, plus reduce the file size considerably. Make sure that under ?EUR??,,????'??Print ?EUR??,,????'??? Properties?EUR??,,????'?? you select the correct page layout, paper size, color print, and under the Adobe PDF Setting you select High Quality Print. Fig. 6. and Fig. 7 show the finish product.

Fig. 7