Transcripts
1. Photoshop for Lunch™ - Scan & Color Line Art - Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Photoshop for Lunch, Clean & Color Scanned Line Art. Photoshop for Lunch is a series of Photoshop classes, everyone of which teaches one or two Photoshop techniques. You'll get plenty of opportunity to practice your new skills in the projects that you create. Today, we're cleaning up and coloring scanned line art. We're going to see how to extract line art from a scan. So we drop out the paper and just keep the lines. Then we're going to see how to color it. So that we can color our object to any color that we like. As you go through, you'll probably see a prompt for a thumbs up for this class. If you enjoy the class, please give it a thumbs up. These are really important to me to make the videos visible on Skillshare. I really appreciate everybody who gives it a thumbs up. If you have any questions, just post them in the community area and I'm only too happy to help you with your questions. If you're ready, let's get started. I've got a piece of scanned line up for you to work with so that you can follow along.
2. Photoshop for Lunch™ - Clean & Color Scanned Line Art - Part 1: To get started with this project of cleaning up some scanned line art and then recoloring it. If you don't have something to work with, I'm going to give you a download link for this page from my sketch book. You can just open it up in Photoshop. If you have line out of your own or drawing of your own, you're free to use that. Now, to start off with, I'm looking at this scooter because this is the one that we're going to extract and color, and I don't think that this line here is perfectly horizontal. I'll go here to the ruler tool, and I'm just going to drag the ruler tool along this line in the image, the line that I think should be horizontal. Then in Photoshop, in later versions of Photoshop, I can click here to straighten the Layer. If you have an earlier version of Photoshop and you don't have this on the toolbar, then you'll go to image rotation and select Arbitrary. Photoshop will already have calculated what angle this line is on, and it's already for you, just click Okay, and it will then straighten the image to that line. The next thing we want to do is just to crop out the scooter. We want to make sure that we get all of the scooter and not too much of anything else that we don't want. Now, I can start with the eraser and start erasing over the bits that I don't want from this image. I've got the eraser selected, let's just say what brush I've got. Well, I'm going to choose this hard edge brush, so I don't need to be particularly neat here. But I will want to erase to transparency because the idea of this cleaning up process is to get the lines out, and to drop everything else away from the image. I'm just going to open the Layers palette here and see what we have. Well, this is a JPEG image and this is a background layer. I can't get to transparency from a background layer. If I try and erase from here, you can see that I'm going to erase the background color. If the background color happened to be black, then I would be a erasing to black. What I need to do is to convert this background layer into a regular layer. We can do that by just clicking on this lock icon, and that will just convert this to a regular layer. Now, if that doesn't work in your version of Photoshop, just pick up the lock icon and drag and drop it on the trash, it has the same effect. Now, when I use the eraser on this image, you can see that we're erasing to transparency. That checker board pattern is telling us that that layer is now transparent. Now we don't want to do too much work with the eraser at this stage because there's some tools that we can work much much faster with. I'm just going to zoom in a bit here. A tool I'm going to use is the Magic Wand Tool, it shares a toolbar position with the Quick Selection Tool, but really a Magic Wand Tool does an awesome job with this line art. Now, the first thing to do with the Magic Wand Tool is to set the tolerance, I'm going to set that to about 25. That sets a color range for the pixels around the area that I'm clicking on, and so since most of the background of this page is white, this should pick up most of it. I also want to deselect contiguous, if I leave contiguous selected and if I click out here, I'm only going to select the pixels around the scooter. I'm not going to get the pixels that are white inside the scooter, so I'm going to disable this checkbox. Now, I'm just going to click. This will have selected most of the white pixels around this image, it won't have got all of them, but we'll have got most of them. I'm just going to press delete and that will drop them right away. Then I want to deselect the selection so I could choose, select, deselect, or it can just press Ctrl or Command+D. To see how we're going? I'm just going to locate the New Layer icon here, and I'm going to Ctrl or Command click on it to add a new layer below the current image layer, I want to fill this with white. Since white is my foreground color, I can press Alt+backspace, Option+Delete on the Mac, to fill this layer with white. Now it doesn't seem like we've progressed very far because this is pretty much the way that the image looked before. But it's on two separate lines, so we know that the black lines are totally separate to the white background. Whenever I'm cleaning up line out like this, I'm really concerned to make sure that I get rid of any stray pixels. I'm going to click here on the FX icon and choose Stroke. What I'm going to do is add a red stroke, so I'm going to make sure that my color is set to red. A trick can be any color you like, but you want to be able to see it really clearly. I'm going to set my size to three or four pixels. I'm going to select outside, because it's important that the stroke surround the pixel. You may not see it if you have, for example, inside selected, and I'll just click Okay. Now, it looks as if this image has developed a case of the chickenpox. What these dots are, are underlying pixels on this layer that we didn't get when we clicked with the Magic Wand Tool. Now we're going with the eraser tool on this layer, the layer that has the line work on it, and I'm just going to erase these dots. What I'm really doing is I'm erasing a colored pixel here. As soon as the colored pixel goes, then there's no point in Photoshop putting a stroke around something that isn't there. I'm going to be very careful as I go over this image, just to make sure that I get rid of all the dots. While as the dots go, I know that the image is getting cleaned up, but I don't want to get in over the lines because I don't want the lines to go. First trip across the image is with a very big eraser just cleaning up the worst of these dots. Then I'll go in very close, so I'm going to zoom into the image using the zoom tool, and I'm going to make sure that I have my eraser set to a very small amount. Now I'm just going to clean up these rough areas. Everywhere I see a lump on the edge, that's a pixel underneath it, so I'm just going to go around very carefully getting rid of this. There's a pixel. Let's say that I'm trying to make sure that my eraser is about the same size as the dot, so I know that if I press the eraser over the dot that I'm going to get rid of the pixel that's causing the problem in the first place. Now, this is going to take me a little while to do so I'm going to stop talking. I'm just going to speed up the video as I clean this image up. If you make a mistake as you're doing this just press Control+Alt+Z, Command+Option+Z on the Mac, just to undo the last stroke that you made, and you can keep on going. Now, it's very important that you do this with a hard edge eraser, because you don't want to have any feathering around your eraser. That's why we chose a brush that had 100 percent hardness on it. It's unusual to be using such hard brushes but for this purpose it really does a very good job. Of course what we want to do when we're cleaning up our line art, particularly if we plan on selling these items, is we want to make sure that if somebody puts this on a page or even where to add a stroke around that they're not going to get those little dots that we saw when we first added the stroke, we want to give them clean line art. I'm pretty happy with the clean up job that I've done, and all I need to do to get rid of this red stroke is to just drag and drop that effect onto the trash can. Now I've got my clean up line art. As it is cleaned up line art, now I can go ahead and color it. But if I'm going to save the image and the main time, I need to make sure that I save it in a format that keeps this transparent layer here. I want to save it as a PSD file, don't save it back as the original JPEG file or else you're going to flatten it and you'll have to get rid of the white all over again. Just save it as a PSD file and you're ready to go.
3. Photoshop for Lunch™ - Clean & Color Scanned Line Art - Part 2: Once you've isolated the line art on the scooter so that you have the line art on a separate layer, you can go ahead and color it. Now, before I do so, I'm a little bit concerned that some of the black lines in the scooter are not quite as black as they could be. So I'm going to adjust them and I'm going to use a Levels Adjustment. I'll choose Image, Adjustment and then Levels. Now in the histogram here, the darks are on this side of the histogram and the lights are over here. So what we're going to do is drag on this little slider here just a little bit in from the left and that's going to darken up the darker pixels. This middle one adjusts the mid tones. We're going to drag it out here to the right because that's going to darken up the mid tones. If you're not sure which way to drag it, just try dragging it in both directions and you'll see really clearly that dragging it to the left is not a good idea. If you want everything to be darker, just drag it to the right. We don't want to make all our tones totally black, we just want to darken them. So click "Okay". Now, we're ready to go ahead and color this scooter. Now, when I'm coloring like this, what I'm going to do is to make sure that I have every color on a separate layer. So I'm going to click here on the bottom most layer and I'm going to add a layer and this is going to be my dark turquoise. I'm going to use that for the scooter body itself so I can make the job of coloring this scooter quite easy if I use the line art itself. You see the line art has been drawn so that every element here is trapped. So around every open area, there is a solid black line. So if I use the Magic Wand tool, I can select these areas by just clicking inside them. It's going to make my job a lot easier. Now I'm going to make sure in this case, that contiguous is checked on. Because if I click in here, I want to just select the pixels in this area, not everywhere in the image. I'm just going to click on that area there. What's happening when we click here with a Magic Wand tool is that we're actually clicking on nothing. There's nothing, there are no pixels in this area. So the Magic Wand tool just selects every pixel that's just like this one. Well, all of these are fully transparent pixels. So Photoshop's selecting all of them and it stops when it runs into a solid line. Because these areas are trapped, we're going to be able to select them really, really easily. Now, the line or the selection's going to go right up to the black line, but it's not going to go over it. This might leave me with a little bit of a gap. So I want to expand this selection just a little bit. So I'm going to choose Select, Modify, Expand, and I'm going to expand by three pixels and click "Okay". Now, that command has been in Photoshop for years and years. So you're going to have it in your version of Photoshop, whatever you're using. Now, I'm going to go and select the dark turquoise layer because that's where I'm going to put my color. Now, I took the chance earlier to prepare my colors and I have this little color swatches here. So I'm going to go and select the eyedropper tool and just click on the color I want to use. Now, because the color is the foreground color, I can press Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac and I'll fill that selection with the color I've chosen. When I've finished filling with the color, I'll press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. I'll go ahead and add another layer, and this is going to be light turquoise. I'm going to use this light turquoise color here to color multiple elements on my scooter. So I'm going back to selecting the scooter. I'm going back to the Magic Wand. I'm going to click on the first of the elements I'm going to color. Since they're all going to need to be selected and expanded, I can do them all at once. So I'm going to hold the Shift key as I click on every other area that I want to color the same color. I now have all those areas selected. I'm now going to expand them. Select, Modify, Expand, three pixels, click "Okay". Make sure I go and select my light turquoise layer, go and pickup my eye dropper, and select the color. Now you could just as easily be selecting colors from your swatches. So I have them in my swatches here. I just find it a little bit easier to be working with them on the screen. Now that I've expanded my selection, I have my color selected, I have the right layer selected, I'll Alt Backspace, Option Delete to fill those areas and then Control or Command D to deselect the selection. I'm going to stop talking now and speed up the video as I finish off coloring the scooter. Once I've finished coloring the scooter, there's just one other change I want to make to this image. If I look very closely at these dark lines, I'll say that there is a very slight haloing around the edges. That's because we haven't necessarily picked up all the lighter pixels just around the edges of our darker lines. Now, to make sure that these lines are not lighter, they're not high load, I'm just going to blend this layer in with the layers below in a darkening blend mode. Now, there are a couple of darkening blend modes. I can use darken as one of them multiply is the other. Either of these will just make sure that any slightly lighter pixels in these line drawings will be blended in with the ones below, and so that we won't see any lighter haloing effect.
4. Photoshop for Lunch™ - Clean & Color Scanned Line Art - Part 3: Now that we've gone ahead and colored our scooter there are a couple of things I want to talk about here and one of them is how you're going to save this. I save this as a PST file, that allows me to keep these layers intact so I can come back at any stage and change any of these colors. When I'm working with things that are perhaps I'm going to sell or I'm not sure exactly what color they really need to be, I will always save a file as a PST file so that I can come back and easily recolor things. So I've come back and said I want to recolor this seat, I'm going to locate the layer that has the seat on it and this is this layer here. If I Ctrl or Command click on the thumbnail here, I select the layer contents so I have marching ends around the pink color. Now all I need to do is to go and select the color to use, for example, I'm going to select the yellow here and then press Alt+Backspace Option Delete on the Mac because this is my foreground color to replace that color in the image, and of course Ctrl or Command+D to deselect the selection. Now there may come a time where I want to recolor the whole object. I'm just going to turn my panel of colors off up here. To recolor the whole object, I would select the topmost layer, and then I would add an adjustment layer, Layer, New Adjustment Layer and we could use Hue/Saturation for example and click Okay. With the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, I can adjust all the colors in the image relative to each other by just dragging on the Hue slider. This just moves all the hues around the color wheel. I get some really interesting color effects from doing just that. If I find a color combination I like, I can disclose that dialogue. The beauty of this is the Hue/Saturation adjustment is just an adjustment layer, so at anytime we can turn it on or off by just clicking on the layer visibility icon here. Of course, if this were us and you were ready to sell it, then you would do a couple of things. For me, I would sell my art as a transparent background, so I want the background to be transparent and they ought to be like this, and so I would save it as a PNG file. The PNG file format is a special one, like JPEG in a way because it flattens the image to a single layer. But unlike JPEG, the background is not necessarily why you can have transparency in a PNG file. So this image would be a flattened scooter with all of coloring and the line art on a single layer in the image, but the background here would be transparent. That would allow somebody to pick up this image into put it on a colored background and the scooter would just sit there, it doesn't bring a white edge with it. So PNG is a really good format for saving that image in if you want to put it on a colored background or sell it as a piece of art for example. I will save it also as a PST file because of course I want to be able to come back in it edited if I need to. If I want to put it up on the web, then it would be JPEG format but of course JPEG is a lousy format, so it's going to be scrunched up a little bit and it's going to carry this background with it. So there you have a quick process for cleaning up and coloring scanned line art, your project for this class is to take the scooter that I've given you or any other piece of line art that you have and to do the same thing with it. Clean up the scan and then color the line out and then post in the projects so we can all see the color schemes that you come up with. I'm really looking forward to seeing them. Please, If you enjoyed this class, give it a thumbs-up, this is really important, the thumbs-up really help the videos to be able to be seen. So I really, really appreciate everybody who gets a thumbs-up to my classes. If you have any questions, use the community panel to ask them and I'm only too happy to help where I can. I'm Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Photoshop for Lunch Clean & Recolor Scanned Line Art. I hope you've enjoyed this class and I hope to see you in future episodes of Photoshop for Lunch.
