Cleaning Lineart & Scans with Adobe® Photoshop® 
So you’ve just drawn and inked an awesome pirate or robot or whatnot and now want to color or manipulate it in photoshop. Yet, your plans are foiled by the scan looking dirty and muddled and the dratted lines sticking rigidly to the background so you desperately and in great effort try to paint over or around it but keep on messing up the lines? Worry not, you can be helped.

Let’s start out by scanning in a drawing, for this tutorial I’ve expertly drawn an angry quasi pirate version of Daffy Duck, or something along those lines.

If you look at it now it doesn’t look like much, the lines aren’t very crisp and the scan itself is very dirty. What we need to do first is to clean this ruddy mess up abit.

Begin by setting your image mode to Grayscale. To do this follow this route Image->Mode-> Check Grayscale-> Don’t Flatten

Now we’ll play with the levels abit, goto Image->Adjustments->Levels and a slider box should appear. Play with the settings abit by using the sliders, ideally you want the background the be a perfect white and all the lines a crisp sharp black, check out the screenshots for a setting that usually accomplishes this.

Tada! Now your drawing should be clean and crisp just sitting there laughing at you wanting to be colored! But wait, first we will need to separate the lines from the background and put them on their own layer!

Start by opening the channels window. If the channel window isn’t open goto Window -> Channels.

Now create a duplicate of the already existing channel, which is named “Gray” on default, by right-clicking it and pressing duplicate. Name the new channel “Invert” for reasons we’ll explore now.

Select the new channel you just made and invert it Image->Adjustments-> invert or press Ctrl + I. Don’t be scared that your drawing flips colors now, it doesn’t actually.

Go back to your layer window and click your only existing layer which should be named “Background” by default. When you click it the colors should return back to normal.

Now create a new empty layer by going to Layer->New Layer and name it “Lines” for reference and select it once it’s created.

The next step is to get only the lines of the drawing selected and having them put on the new layer you just created. To do this, goto Select->Load Selection and a new window should appear. Use the screenshot for reference. Now check the Channel Dropdown menu and select the “Invert” channel that you created and press ok.

You should now see that only your lines have been selected, if they are then there should be the “Marching Ants” all over then.

Nextly, we need to fill that selection in with some color, because at the moment they technically still are on the background. Make sure you do not deselect your lines and be certain that you are working on the “Lines” layer that you created and that your foreground color is black.

Now goto Edit->Fill and a new window should appear. Make sure the settings are set to 100% opacity, blending mode: normal and that under Contents in the dropdown menu “Foreground Color” is selected. Now press ok.

The lines should have been filled in now with black on your lines layer. Select your “Background” Layer now and clear everything off it by filling it with white.

Voila! You should now have your drawing sitting happily on its layer, clean and crisp and ready to be hampered with further!

I hope you found this tutorial helpful and will make me proud by posting 100s of beautiful, clean lineart in the gallery. Enjoy!

- Zeroe

This entry was posted on Friday, August 4th, 2006 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Lessons/Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.