How To Clean Up Scanned Drawings In Photoshop

When I started working with Photoshop, my main difficulty was to go a nice clean line with a transparent background to work with. I think spending hours and hours erasing every lilliputian bit of white groundwork, every little misplaced pixel that would bother me.

Present, I do this very quickly so I tin can spend my valuable time on more of import steps. If you are a beginner in Photoshop, this article might be of involvement to you.

I know that there are other ways to get to the aforementioned consequence and there are loads of tutorials out in that location. This is the way that works best for me, and it might work for you besides.

For this tutorial, I'm using a blackness and white analogy that I did for Women'due south History Calendar month for The Puddlejump Collective, which I am a member of. Whether your image is a mess of pencil lines or a neatly inked line art, the process is the same.

The first step is to scan your drawing. On my scanner, the default setting is a quick standard quality scan, and then I prepare information technology up for a higher quality one, at to the lowest degree 300dpi.

Yous so open it in Photoshop (I have the CC version simply I'm virtually sure yous can do this in older versions besides). As you tin encounter, the contrast is very poor so we need to make the line darker. Double click on the layer called background to modify it into a layer.

And then click on Epitome -> Adjustments -> Levels.

Play with the Input Levels sliders in guild to make the black lines that you lot want to keep darker and the dirty gray-ish areas that you want to remove lighter. Focus on the black and white sliders, not as much on the grey one. Be careful because this is where yous can mess things up: push button the dark too much and you'll end upward with inelegant dramatic blackness lines. Button the white too much and y'all'll lose some lines or shading. Evidently with an inked drawing, this footstep is much more straightforward.

Next, become the Channels tab, beside the Layers, and select the Color Channel which shows the best line work. Here I picked the red ane, because it removed all the red sketch lines that I didn't desire to keep. Select the line work past clicking Ctrl + the channel thumbnail.

Become dorsum to the Layers tab and click on Select -> Changed. And so click on the symbol to create a new layer, at the bottom of the Layers tab. When you are on this new layer, click Edit -> Fill.

A new window opens. Select Contents -> Black (y'all can experiment hither by picking a different color for your line piece of work)

We have now created a layer with the line piece of work just. And then let's create a new layer for the background. Click on the symbol at the lesser of the Layers tab again and this time fill up the whole layer with white: Edit -> Fill and then Contents -> White. Again, you lot tin chose a different color for your background if information technology suits y'all.

Remove Layer visibility for the layer with your scan by clicking on the little eye beside it. At this phase, you might observe that your line piece of work is a bit light. To set up this, right-click on the layer and select Duplicate layer. Do this every bit many times every bit you lot demand and merge all the line layers in one layer (select them all, correct-click and select Merge layers).

And that'due south it! You end up with 3 layers: the background, the initial scan (invisible, you may delete this layer if you lot desire), and your line work. Rename them to make things clearer. Create a new layer, place information technology underneath your line work layer and starting time colouring!

Or if you want to exercise like I did for the concluding analogy, reduce the opacity of your line work and print it. You tin and then ink on top of these very faint lines. Here is the last version: