XnSketch is a free software that can convert your pictures into cartoons or sketches. It has eighteen different effects to turn your images into sketches. In addition to the preset effects, it also allows you to adjust the edge strength, opacity, contrast, saturation, color and other level of your images. It gives you options to save your pictures to the hard disk or share them with friends.
You can download XnSketch from the XnView website. The download is around 15 megabytes. It is a portable application which means that you do not have to install anything on your system. Just download the ZIP file, extract the contents of the ZIP archive to a folder and run XnSketch.exe from there. You can also copy all the extracted contents to your USB key so that you can run it from any computer you want.
Using XnSketch is as easy as it can be. Just open a picture in XnSketch (by clicking on the Open button in the toolbar). Then all you have to do is click on the preset effects. Theres are around twenty effects near the bottom of the XnSketch window. You can click on any of the preset effects to apply it. The effects are applied to the main picture and you can see the preview immediately.
There are preset effects like pastel, dull pastel, mono, pencil and four sketch effects which make your picture look like a sketch drawn by an artist. The cartoon effects give your picture a cartoon look. Theres are special effects like photocopy, halftone, oil sketch etc., which turn your picture into photocopied image, halftoned image or oil sketch respectively. Other than the preset effects, you can also manually adjust the color balance, contrast, gamma, exposure levels etc., for the picture.
If you are not satisfied with the manual adjustments of an effect and want to start over then you can click on the Reset button under the manual adjustment settings. You can also rotate the image left or right from the toolbar. When you are done with the effects, you can either save the image file to your hard disk or share it with your friends. XnSketch has an in-built option to share your picture with friends through Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Tumblr, Imgur, YFrog, GlowFoto, TwitPic and many more online image sharing services.
The XnSketch Windows application is designed by the same people who made the popular image viewer XnView. This free application allows you to add many different types of sketching and cartoon effects to your pictures. The program offers more than 18 different sketching effects which can be manually adjusted by changing the contrast, brightness, exposure, edge stength and other levele.
You can download the free XnSketch software from http://www.xnview.com/en/xnsketch/.