Tutorial: Cleaning Up Line Art for Digital Painting in Photoshop (Pt2)

Welcome to Wayfarer Wings! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Table of contents for Photoshop Linework Tutorial

Tutorial: Cleaning Up Line Art for Digital Painting in Photoshop (Pt1)
Tutorial: Cleaning Up Line Art for Digital Painting in Photoshop (Pt2)

From Roughs to Inks
This is Part 2 of 2 of my tutorial on how to take a picture from rough, scanned pencils and turn it into a clean inked drawing, suitable for Photoshop painting. If you’re just tuning in, you may want to check out Part 1 of this tutorial!

STEP 4

Once I’ve finished carefully inking over the blue lines, I scan the whole thing back in, full color. When I open it up in Photoshop, I get this sloppy ink-over-blue effect, like you see here.

The first thing I need to do is get rid of the blue lines under the ink. So let’s do that by removing everything but the Blue Channel. Usually, you can find your Channel menu located down with your Layers and History menus. If it’s not there, you may need to go to your Window menu along the top toolbar and select Channels to see it.

It’s really easy to remove the channels. All you have to do is click the Blue Channel, and there you go. Blue lines are gone!

STEP 5

So, now I’ve gotten rid of the blue lines. And I’d like to keep them gone…. since all I want are the ink lines I’ve drawn over the blue. I completely remove all color permanently by putting the image in Grayscale. To put the image in Grayscale:
-Choose the Image menu.
-Select Mode.
-Select Grayscale.

Well, Grayscale isn’t the mode that I want to leave this image in since it’s now only in black and white. Not to mention resizing and editing ends up pixeled. So we want to reverse the process and put the image back into RGBColor now. To put the image in RGB Color:
-Choose the Image menu.
-Select Mode.
-Select RGB Color.

STEP 6

Now that I’ve got the image back in RGB Color, it’s time to do the final clean up job on the inks! Right now, I have inks that are rather grungy looking and not fit for painting over at all…

What I do is adjust the Brightness and Contrast to get rid of anything that isn’t black and white. Done correctly, this gives your inks a smooth and clean line, allowing you to paint and fill without any problems. To clean up the linework:
-Choose the Image menu.
-Select Adjustments.
-Select Brightness/Contrast.

Now the Brightness and Contrast box should be on the screen. Adjust the sliders until you get rid of all the grunge behind the inks. There’s really no method to doing this… it all varies from picture to picture how far the sliders need to go. Be careful not to slide too much or you’ll lose lighter lines or get a bunch of pixles.

The only thing I can suggest with this section is to adjust Contrast first and then follow up with Brightness until you get things looking the way you want them. Almost always, Contrast will be a higher number than Brightness for me.

STEP 7

With the final clean up done, now all that is left is a white background and my ink lines. I take this time to manually clean up stray lines with my eraser and fill in the areas that need to be black. When all is said and done, I get a piece like this… clean and ready for coloring!

CLOSING
So there you have it. Step by step, how I get a piece of line art ready to paint!I know that I’m not the only one to use this method — I actually picked up these tips over time from various other places and artists and played around with it a lot before I found a method that worked for me. I hope that there is something here that you will find useful in your own works.If you’re interested in getting in my works, please visit my manga at Wayrift and Shimmer. Also, feel free to come visit the Sygnus community of artists and writers at the Sygnus Forums.

Previous in series

Rate this:

1.7

Posted by User Image Aywren