Clean & Color Scanned Line Art in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Scan and Color Line Art in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class clean and color scanned line art in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're cleaning up and coloring scanned line art. We're going to say 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 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, so 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 pace of scanned lined art for you to work with so that you can follow along. 2. Scan and Color 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 SketchBook and you can just open it up in Photoshop. If you have line art 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. So 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 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, Image Rotation and select Arbitrary. Photoshop will already have calculated what angle this line is on, and it's all ready for you just to 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. We've got the eraser selected, let's just see what sort I've got. Well, I'm going to choose this hard edge brush. I don't need to be particularly neat here, but I will want to erase it 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 pallet 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 to the background color and if the background color happen to be black, then I would be 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 checkerboard 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 use that we can work much, much faster with. I'm just going to zoom in a bit here and a tool I'm going to use is the Magic Wand tool. It shares a toolbar position with the Quick Selection tool, but really the Magic Wand tool does an awesome job with this line art. Now, the first thing to do with the Magic one 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, and 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 and this will have selected most of the white pixels around this image. It won't have got all of them, but will 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 I can just press Control or Command + D. To say how we're going I'm just going to locate the new layer icon here and I'm going to Control or Command, click on it to add a new layer below the current image layer and I want to fill this with white. Since white is my foreground color, I can press Alt + backspace, Option + Delete on my 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 layers so we know that the black lines are totally separate to the white background. Whenever I'm cleaning up line art 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. It can be any color you like, but you want to be able to see it really clearly and I'm going to set my size to 304 pixels. I'm going to select outside because it's important that the strokes 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 and 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 and 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. Well, 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. 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. I'm just going to go around very carefully getting rid of these. There's a pixel. Let's say that I'm trying to make sure that my eraser is about the same size as the dots so I know that if I press the eraser over the dot that I'm going to get rid of, the pixel it'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 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 a 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 lineup, 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 it 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 cleanup 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 cleaned 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 in 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 are going to flatten it and you'll have to get rid of the white all over again so just save it as a PSD file and you're ready to go. 3. Scan and Color Line Art - Part 2 : Once you've isolated the line art on this 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 this scooter are not quite as black as they could be. 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. What we're going to do is drag on this little slider here just a little bit in from the left. That's going to darken up the darker pixels. This middle one adjusts the midtones, and we're going to drag it out here to the right because that's going to darken up the midtones. 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. Click Okay. Now we're ready to go ahead and color this scooter. Now when I'm coloring like this, all I'm going to do is to make sure that I have every color on a separate layer. I'm going to click here on the bottom-most layer and I'm going to add a layer. This is going to be my dark turquoise. I'm going to use that for the scooter body itself. 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. Around every open area, there is a solid black line. 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 the area there. What's happening when we click here with the Magic Wand Tool is that we're actually clicking and there are no pixels in this area. The Magic Wand Tool just selects every pixel that's just like this one. Well, all of these are fully transparent pixels, so photoshop 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 easily. Now, the line or the selection is 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. I want to expand this selection just a little bit. I'm going to choose Select, Modify, Expand. I'm going to expand by three pixels and click "Okay". That command has been in Photoshop for years so you're going to have it in your version of Photoshop or 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 these little color swatches here. 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 day-to-day select the selection. I'll go ahead and add another layer. This is going to be light turquoise. I'm going to use this light turquoise color here to color multiple elements on my scooter. 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. 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 pick up my eyedropper, and select the color. Now you could just as easily be selecting colors from your swatches. 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 right 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 this scooter. Once I've finished coloring this 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 haloid, 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 is 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. Scan and Color Line Art - Part 3: Now that we've gone ahead and colored our scooter, there a couple of things I want to talk about here and one of them is how you're going to save this. Now, I saved this as a PSD 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 PSD file so that I can come back and easily recolor things. I've come back and said, I want to re-color this seat. I'm going to locate the layer that has the seat on it and this is this layer here. If I Control or Command, click on the thumbnail here, I select the layer contents. I have matching ends around the pink color. Now all I need to do is to go and select a 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. Of course, Control or Command D to deselect the selection. Now there may come a time where I want to re-color the whole object. I'm just going to turn my panel of colors off up here. To re-color 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 and I get some really interesting color effects from doing just that. If I find a color combination I like, I can just close that dialogue. The beauty of this is the hue saturation adjustment is just an adjustment layer. At any time we can turn it on or off by just clicking on the layer visibility icon here. Of course, if this were art and if 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. I want the background to be transparent and the art to be like this and I would save it as a ping file, a PNG file. The ping file format is a special one. It's like JPEG and why because it flattens the image to a single layer. But unlike JPEG, the background is not necessarily white, you can have transparency in a ping file. This image would be a flattened scooter with all the 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 and to put it on a colored background and the scooter would just sit there. It doesn't bring a white edge with it. Ping 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 PSD file because, of course, I want to be able to come back in and edit it 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 lossy format, so it's going to be scrunched up a little bit and it's going to carry this background with it. There you have a quick process for cleaning up and coloring scan 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 art and then post it in the project so we can all see the color schemes that you come up with. I'm really looking forward to seeing them. Please, if you enjoy this class, give it a thumbs up. This is really important. The thumbs up really help the videos to be able to be seen. I really, really appreciate everybody who gives 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. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining with for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.