Cleaning up line art

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Posted By
DeerRaven
Dec 22, 2003
Views
389
Replies
6
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Closed
Okay. So I did this line art from pencil and inked it. Erased and picked up all kinds of little marks n’ stuff, scanned it at 600 dpi,(that’s what this book says to do, FYI), went back in and cleaned it up again on the computer. It looked spotless.

Set the image to 300 dpi, converted it to greyscale, then to RGB, which is what I’m working in on accounta I’m just sending to my little Epson C80 Stylus. Also tried CMYK in case the mode was the problem.

Selected ALL

Went Edit>Copy then clicked to the right of the layers tab for Channels. Made a new channel and labeled it "line art". Made sure that the Color Indicates Masked Areas is checked. Made sure the color is pure black with 100% opacity. Clicked OK. The area went black.

Went to Edit>Paste

And there was the line art with what appeared to be *every* imperfection in the world *still there*. It was amazing. Like I’d taken a big black magic marker and went nuts with it.

So….my question is…..how do you get line art *clean enough*?

I wound up coloring it in a layer with the multiple blend mode selected. Looks great but I had to go back in and redo the ink work for that crisp black. Sure, this process is intended for CMYK but it looked like a time-saver if I could’ve worked in "flats" like I was hoping, from back to front. Ideas?

Thanks,
Martha

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Gene Trujillo
Dec 22, 2003
You can usually get nice looking line art by using levels or curves to set your black point and white points, followed by threshold and/or the high pass filter to clean it up.
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Phosphor
Dec 22, 2003
If Levels or Curves thins some of your lines out too much, you may want to do what I do:

After I manually clean out the big, really dark background spots and smudges, I use this to get rid of any leftover background haze and the lighter smudges:

Image—»Adjustments—»Selective Color…

Start with the "Whites" in the drop down menu, cranking all the sliders the whole way to the left. Sometimes, you need to do this a couple times. Also, you can try "Neutrals" in the Selective Color drop down menu. It can do a lot of work quickly, but you have to pay close attention to your lines to make sure they don’t drop out or get thinner than you want them.
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DeerRaven
Dec 22, 2003
Wowsers, guys. I knew there had to be something I was missing. I’m a total newby when it comes to coloring in channels; I find it interesting that this step is completely neglected in *both* books I have on the subject of coloring digitally. Thank you so much. This is only the most useful forum on the planet.

Martha
PC
Pierre_Courtejoie
Dec 22, 2003
There is also the old Kaï tip: use blur, then levels and bring the two external sliders towards the center…
<http://development.gurusnetwork.com/kpt/tip/4/>
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DeerRaven
Dec 22, 2003
Pierre, thank you. The more information I have on this the better. They don’t go into this kind of in-depth study at school where Photoshop is used primarily for the web.

Thanks again.

Martha
PC
Pierre_Courtejoie
Dec 23, 2003
That is why I’m addicted to forums like this one and www.photoshoptechniques.com or www.photoshogurus.info …and others 😀

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