Art Image Optimization: mini tutorial^^

ok, sorry, forgot to say that this is for sketches or pencil only drawings, if you are planning to cg your pic. this is not a good method

Image Optimization: mini tutorial^^


okay, i was boring myself to death in some friend's house, so i decided to do this for i have notice many people have issues when it comes to digitalize your pictures, now, the drawing is kinda crappy but it was the only one i had u_u
here it goes, the procedure it's kind of simple but i find it useful, hope you like it, ah, it's for adobe photoshop^^

* fist of all, its important that you scan your image with at least 300 dpi resolution, in grayscale. here's the original scan

* as you see, the color is kind of faded, so what must people do is to mess with the contrast/brightness settings, often getting terrible results (don't do it!^^)

* ok, now duplicate the layer your drawing is in(for now on, i'll refer to it as sketch layer), and delete the original. create a new layer BELOW the sketch, and fill it with white color.

* select sketch and hit the brightness/contrast option(image>adjustments) and decrease the contrast level until the background is white enough but without losing much of the black line quality. mine was already white enough so i'll skip this step^^

* then, in the layer panel, go to the Channel section, and click the load channel as selection option. now hit delete to erase all white areas, you'll notice the pic will become almost invisible, that can be easily fixed, just click the preserve transparecy option, then use alt+backspace to fill the layer with black, actually, this can be used to turn your picture into any color you want^^(whoa! what a nice trick^_^U)

* now, it got darker but not enough, so what we do next is we duplicate the layer several times(i wouldnt recommend more than three times^^) to darken the image, here's the example^^ then merge down the duplicated layers(ctrl+e)

* the next step requires a little patience, it consist in erasing the most visible errors, look at the pic^_- it's not that complicated n__n

and there you go! if you want, play a little with the levels and you're done!

hope you find this useful, any question, suggestion, comment, insult...right here!

take a look at the final picture

see ya!

 

Thank you Chejo for this wonderful and brief tutorial. I find it really helpful, since I spend a lot of time trying to clean my piccies and producing good line art.

 

Nice tutorial, good info.

- Ark

 

hmmm. nice work. I'll add to it if you don't mind. .
this is actually almost identical to how i colour now. Only i don't suggest duplicating layers of the line art to darken the image. I usually leave this as it is, and colour the sections under the original line art. Then when you're finished you can go back to the original line art and colour the lines to match the rest of the image. If you multiply the line art layers this becomes very difficult, and is almost impossible to completely mask the original black outline. (it becomes patchy and unclean.)

once this is done, its best to move your line art from the top layer to the one just above the background. This way, if you've used feathering nicely with your selections, you get a nice gradient instead of coloured outline. (depending if you want this or not. .)

i hope this makes sense, but i can't be bothered writing more right now:bleed:

 

Interesting tutorial Chejo. I have PhotoShop and PaintShopPro, but I simply use PSP pretty much all the time.

My way of cleaning up a scan involves just one duplicated layer to multiply the lines, but also I add some gamma correction, unsharp mask, and edge-preserving smooth (that's with PSP).

Sometimes I also cursor-erase the background to make sure there aren't any faint specks left.

 

thanks for the comments, glad you guys found it useful^^

Poom poom, ah, yep, it's a different procedure if you want to color your pic, i've edited the subject already, sorry, my bad^^U

i've never used psp before, saberJ if you think photoshop is complex, you should try Corel photopaint<---this is really complex ^_-