“Linegrabbing in Photoshop” - Bob Macneil

The technique of “Linegrabbing” is a vital one in digital art. It allows you to create more detailed paintings without the fear of losing any quality in your linework and using the the detail of the lineart itself to your advantage. This technique ties in well with Bob’s Tutorial on Digital Painting Techniques.

Step 1: Add a new channel to your painting document.

Step 2: With the newly added channel selected, access the pulldown menu from the “image” section at top of interface, and select the option “apply image”.

Step 3: A second window appears, titled “apply image”. Select the layer pulldown option (now select the layer you designated for your final line drawing, in this example I titled it “line-multiplied”)

Step 4: Select the blending pulldown option (which by default is set to multiply) and change it to “normal”.

Step 5: Select the channel pulldown option (which by default is currently set to the channel your working with, in this example it’s titled line selection) and change it to “RGB”.
(note: at this stage (if you have followed the steps correctly) your final line drawing should appear as it does in the example)

Step 6: Select “invert” to change your final line drawing to appear in negative.

Step 7: Access the pulldown menu from the “select” section at top of interface, and select the option “load selection”.

Step 8: A second window appears, titled “load selection”. Select the channel you just created from the channel pulldown. In this example I titled it ” line selection”, and click ok.

Step 9: If you have followed these steps correctly, you should have a loaded selection that is generated from your final clean line drawing. In a channel mask, white represents the areas that are selectable and black represents the areas of the channel that aren’t. If you have a channel with grays in it, those areas are selectable based on the percentage of white they contain. (i.e. 50% gray will allow you to paint through that area of selection with a 50% amount of opacity strength)

By doing this you have made a channel that allows you to use your final line art as a mask when drawing or applying paint. So now your line drawing can be used to input clean and decisive lines into your drawing that provides your detailing stage with an extra amount of confidence.

Thanks to Bob MacNeil for his wicked contribution, don’t forget to check out his Focus piece here!

- X, Zeroe

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Lessons/Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.