Achieve this effect: Glowing outline of a photograph

Question

There's an image effect I want to recreate. Heres the image (SLIGHTLY NSFW): Image

I can roughly recreate the effect, but I don't like it as much. My steps are:

The Original

Step 1: Duplicate, desaturate, smart blur (edges only), blend mode

Step 2: Fiddle with curves

And in the end, I can play around with colors. Unfortunately, I seem to have saved the picture incorrectly, however, not too much changes anyway.

Done

So now I'm reasonably happy with it, but...

Problems

...but the edges are still very thin and I cant find a very good way to make them stronger. Also, in the image I want to recreate, there is a strong white glow on thicker lines - not so in my version. Here, the color is just 'shining trough'.

Any ideas on how to improve this?

Thank you very much for the feedback.

Answer 1

It looks to me like the entire image you're trying to copy is done with the Glowing Edges filter and then adjusting the Hue/Saturation.

I believe in new versions of Photoshop its been moved to the Filter Gallery. So get to it by Filter → Filter Gallery → Stylize → Glowing Edges