The neighboring relationship of sketch patches and photo patches on the manifold cannot always reflect their intrinsic data structure. To resolve this problem, a Locality-Constrained Neighbor Embedding (LCNE) based face sketch-photo synthesis algorithm was proposed. The Neighbor Embedding (NE) based synthesis method was first applied to estimate initial sketches or photos. Then, the weight coefficients were constrained according to the similarity between the estimated sketch patches or photo patches and the training sketch patches or training photo patches. Subsequently, alternative optimization was deployed to determine the weight coefficients, select K candidate image patches and update the target synthesis patch. Finally, the synthesized image was generated by merging all the estimated sketch patches or photo patches. In the contrast experiments, the proposed method outperformed the NE based synthesis method by 0.0503 in terms of Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) index and by 14% in terms of face recognition accuracy. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed method resolves the problem of weak compatibility among neighbor patches in the NE based method and greatly alleviates the noises and deformations in the synthetic image.