Trouble with charcoal sketches is that different people do them very differently – and they are a beast to get realistic from photographs. This one
<
http://www.users.on.net/sestewart/IMG_3063copy.jpg>
looks something like one of my charcoal sketches (only rather more accomplished – I suck at drawing portraits!) – when I’m drawing with charcoal I tend to use a lot of directional lines and smudging to draw in the tones rather than the linear style that Ray’s method would give you….
I’m not sure if I could replicate this if wanted to! – I started by removing the colour, lightening the image, duplicating the layer then adding some noise and motion blurring (to give the impression of directional strokes), then setting the blending mode of this layer to vivid light – which really increases the contrast. Then I flattened, duplicated the layer, and applied the chalk and charcoal filter – and reduced the opacity of this top layer a bit and merged down…(then I stoped taking notes and as I tried things and went back I’m not quite sure what happened!) – there was some manual smudging using the smudge tool, a posterise at about 9 or ten levels, some highlights added back by hand using a chalk brush, and finally a texturiser filter using the sandstone filter to imitate the texture of rough paper…..
NB One thing, you always have to be careful using the sketch filters (particualrly charcoal and charcoal and chalk) that you have the default colours set or you can get some very odd results.