Color a Scanned Sketch in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Color Scanned Sketches in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class color: a scanned sketch 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 looking at how you can colorize scanned sketches. We're going to start out by talking about how to scan your sketches in the best possible way, and then how to colorize them. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Photoshop, and if you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. So if you're ready now, let's get started colorizing scanned sketches in Photoshop. 2. Color Scanned Sketches - Part 1: Before we get started colorizing a scan, let's have look at a couple of versions of the scanned image. So this is directly out of my sketchbook. The first scan was as a black and white document and the second scan, I did this as a black and white photo. You'll see that the black and white photo because I was working with a 2B pencil, has a lot more of sort of the pencil rubbings all over the image. The black and white is a lot cleaner of a scan. So you'll want to experiment before you start working on your images and just say what your scanner can provide to you, and you'll start with whatever you think is the best result that you've got. So I've already opened the one that I'm going to use and I'm actually using the one that was scanned as a black and white image, so this is the lightest sort of version of the image. So I'm going to start by cropping it because I want to get rid of the remnants of the sketchbook here. I'm just using the crop tool to just select around the area that I want to keep and I'm clicking the checkmark. I'm going to press Control or Command zero to zoom into the image. Now, at this point, if you did scan the image in using a black and white option on your scanner, chances are that the image is actually in the wrong color mode and you won't even be able to color it at this point. So you'll need to choose image and then mode and you want to make sure that you're in RGB color, because it's only in RGB color that you can actually color this image. Now we're ready to get started coloring this, and I'm going to give you a link so that you can actually download this particular image and work on it yourself. But before we get started coloring, let's go and borrow the colors that we're going to use from a photograph of some California poppies. 3. Color Scanned Sketches - Part 2: When you're coloring elements in Photoshop, it can help you if you go and give a color scheme to use. What I'm going to do is actually borrow the colors of a California Poppy from a photograph of a California Poppy and I'm going to show you how to do this. The images from Morgue file, I'm going to give you the download link for it. You'll go to the site and then just scroll down and you can click here to download it and you're going to open it in Photoshop. I've already done that. To get a color scheme from this image, we're going to choose first of all, Image and then Mode and this time we're going to Indexed Color. We're going to choose Local Perceptual as the option here. Then we can set how many colors we want to extract from this image. Now, not all of these colors in the image are going to be useful because we probably don't want the colors from the bay, we don't want the darker colors here. We want to set the colors value to large enough so we can get some oranges that we can use and some greens but knowing too that we're going to get quite a few colors that we don't need. I'm actually going to set this to 40, I don't need a lot of colors and I'm just going to click "Okay". Then I'm going to choose again Image, mode and this time Color Table. These are the colors that I have sampled from the image. You can see I've got some greens with some nice oranges as well. I want to save this so I'm going to click "Save" and the color table is going to be saved in my current Photoshop folder. I just want to take note of that so that you can open it in a minute. I'm just going to call this Poppies and it's going to be an ACT file and I'll click "Save". I can now click "Okay" and I can just close this image. I don't need to save it. Before you go on with coloring this image, you will want to make sure that you are still working in RGB color mode. If this says, "Indexed Color." Then you need to go back to Image, Mode and you need to make sure that you're working in RGB color, because otherwise you won't be able to paint it the way that you want to. In addition, your brushes won't look very good if you're working in index color, they're just not pretty at all. Just be aware that you need to be in RGB color mode at this point. I'm going to open up my swatches panel. Now I've got the default swatches sitting here. I want to open up and load the ones I just saved. I'm clicking the "Flyout" panel. I'm going to choose Load Swatches and I'm going to the folder in which I just stored my swatches. They are in the Photoshop folder for this particular class. Now I won't save them when I'm in the folder because at the moment it's set to Swatches ACO and my swatches file is that color table ACT file. I'm going to open up color table ACT and here's my Poppies. I'm just going to load them in. Now we've got the oranges and some of the greens that we want to color our image loaded into our swatches panel. Because I'm going to be sampling these a little bit, I'm going to move my color swatches out of the panel over here. I'm also going to bring my layers out because we're going to have to work on a lot of layers here. I'm going to start by adding a layer because you want to make sure that all of your painting goes on separate layers. What I'm going to start out with is I'm going to make these lines not black anymore. I want them to be a really dark brown. I'm going to sample a really dark brown here as my foreground color and I'm going to fill this layer with a dark brown. Now because it's my foreground color, I can fill the currently selected layer by pressing "Alt Backspace' option "Delete." Of course, what that's done for now is to completely cover up my image but I can go to something like Color Blend Mode here. What that does is it just applies the color to pixels in the image that we're already colored that were black or any other color. That's actually re-colored all my line work. Now if that's not a heavy enough color, we can multiply it. I'm actually going to make a duplicate of my background layer. I want to just keep the background in case I need it, but for now I'm going to make a duplicate of it. I'm going to merge this one down. I'm going to right-click and choose "Merge Down". Now this layer is the one that has all the detail on it. We're not even seeing the background layer. I'm going to duplicate this, just drag it onto the new layer icon and I'm going to blend it using Multiply Blend Mode and that will just darken this up a little bit. If it's too much, I can just drag down the opacity. That's the before and this is the after. I'm pretty happy with that. Again, I'm going to just merge this down. I have a single layer here that is feasible and on it is my sketchy drawing now with the lines nice and brown colored. It's a really good starting point for my coloring. 4. Color Scanned Sketches - Part 3: For my coloring, I'm going to start by adding a new layer. I'm going to select the brush, so I'm going to the brush tool. I'm just going to open up the brushes panel. You can use any brush that you like. I'm actually going to use a medium edge brush. I'm going to click on this one that has a really soft edge, just going to increase its hardness a little bit to 31. I'm going to sample a color that I want for my flower. I'm going to do it in a quite a rich orange here. So just click that to select it. Now I'm just going to start painting, I'm going to paint within this leaf. You can be as careful as you like, so you could fill this incompletely, or you can do as I'm doing and be a little bit more sketchy about this, because if you choose a slightly sketchier brush, you're going to get an even sketches effect with your painting. Now, you'll see that as I'm painting, when I paint over a line, I'm actually completely covering up that line. We can get around that by applying a blend mode to this layer. If you're on a Mac before you do this, you'll want to go and select something like the rectangular marquee tool, because that's the only way that you can get these blend modes to work the way I am going to show you. I'm going to click on "Normal" and then I'm going to select "To Dissolve", and now on a PC, I can just press the down arrow key. On a Mac, I can press "Shift Plus Shift Minus" to move through this list. As you go, you'll see that some of these only color the line, but others off the blend modes, will allow you to color the paper underneath so you can get different effects. This is Hard-light, Vivid-light, Linear-light. So there are all sorts of blend modes that you can choose, from some which makes sense, and others which do not. I think for my purposes, multiplies going to be the blend mode of choice. But the whole leaf is a little bit dark for me, so I'm just going to wind down the opacity of my paint to about 75 percent. Because I want to get a slightly overlapping effect, where if I over paint this area that I've already painted, I want it to be a little bit darker. I'm going to put my next paint job on a new layer, going back to my brush and my sign color, just going to re-size the brush. I do that using the open and closed square bracket case, they just nice, easy way of re-sizing your brush on the go. It's going to re-size this, and run down here. I know that I'm going over some paint work that I've already done, and that's just fine, because this is the effect I want. Again, now that I know what blend mode I'm going to use, I'm going back to the multiply blend mode. I'm again going to go to my opacity, and set that to 75 percent. Here, where I've overlap these paint areas, I'm getting a slight darkening, and I really like that effect that's working for this particular image. I'm going to go ahead and speed up the video as I paint out these flowers. I'm going to paint here, and just this bit over here. Then we'll go and come back and have a look at doing the greenery. Before we finish up with the paint job, you can see that I've over painted here. I did that deliberately, because I want to show you how you can get rid of it. The first thing that you need to do when you paint too much and you want to get rid of some paint, is you need to ascertain what layer the paint is on. Now, it's on this layer here. So I'm going to the eraser tool. The eraser tool uses brushes, so you can just go and select a brush for the eraser. Now, I'm going to select one here that has zero hardness, but I'm actually going to wind it up to big quite hard. I've just set that to about 80 percent. I'm just going to erase over the paint area that I don't want the paint to be on. Also, I don't think I want the paint down here. Again, I can just go and try and work out where that paint is. Here, it is on this layer, so I'm going to target this layer, and now just erase the paint that I don't want. You can use a softer or harder brush, whatever you want to do there. Remembering that you're only getting rid of the paint at this stage, you're not going to be affecting the lines, because the lines are elsewhere in the document. 5. Color Scanned Sketches - Part 4: I'm going to do something pretty similar with the green areas. I'm going to add a new layer and I'm going to sample some green color that I'm going to use. But before I do so, I would really like to save this color just in case I need it later on. I'm just going to add it to the swatches panel now. It's already in the swatches panel. It's going to be a little bit difficult for me to ascertain exactly which one I used. I'm just going to call this petal color. Click "Okay". Now because it's saved to the swatches panel, we can get it at any time because it's called petal color. I'm going to select this grain to use here, but I'm going to click on it, and I'm actually going to call this leaf color so that I can be clear about what I've used. So I have a new layer here. I'm going again to my brush. Make sure I'm working on a brush and not the arrays, and I'm going to start painting. Now, if you get into trouble like I do a bit, because I'm not very good at painting in a downwards direction, you can just rotate your image, go to image, image rotation and just rotate it 90 degrees. It's not affecting the image at all and it just makes it a little easier perhaps if you're better at using a brush in a horizontal direction and vertical direction, you can just go in and color your lines. From it's going to come in and color them while I'm here. Might do a little bit more, a little bit later on the bottom edges here, but I'm just going to call that good. Then I'm going to put the image back where it came from, image rotation and back 90 degrees counterclockwise this time. Again, I'm going to use the multiply blend mode. I'm just going to decrease down my opacity quite a bit. Now, I've lost the overlapping fill here, so I'm just going to add a new layer, I'm just going to put a little bit of greenery on this new layer. That's going to give me this overlap appearance. I think I've been a bit heavy flustered with that. So I'm just going to come in with the arrays at all and just erase the bits that I don't want. Around the neck of a California poppy, the color is very rich, so I'm going to select this color, just going to click on it and make it poppy nick. Now I can just paint this color into this area here. But again, I want to make sure I'm working with a brush and not trying to paint with the arrays, so which is going to be very disappointing because it's just simply not going to work. Now, I'm using the scrubby sliders here. A scrubby slider is where you're actually dragging on the word opacity rather than clicking the drop down arrow and then just dragging on this slider, you can just drag on the word and adjust the opacity that way. Most handy way of doing that. Now, I need to do the cap of the California poppy, which again is in a green color. I'm going to choose a slightly different color to the one I used before. Now, I'm going to go on and finish up just the greenery underneath here. In the next video, I want to come back and show you how you could add a wash background. We're going to have to do something special in Photoshop to ensure that when we apply the wash background, that it's not going to interact with the leaves. 6. Color Scanned Sketches - Part 5: At this point, the image might be complete to your satisfaction, and if so, you can go ahead and save it and you're often on your way. But if you want to add a wash to the image, we're going to look and see how we would do that now. At this point, we need to compromise and get rid of this background layer, this one that we were holding that is not visible. I'm just going to delete that. I'm going to turn the background, which is the image layer that has the white paper and all the lines on it, and I'm going to make it a background layer. Now, that's really unusual, usually what we're doing, is making the background layer, not a background layer. Well, this time we're going to go in reverse. I have it selected, I'm going to choose "Layer", New, Background from layer. This is now a background layer. I'm going to add a layer immediately above it by clicking on the New Layer icon. I got a little bit enthusiastic there, so let's just have one layer here. I've got a blue color already selected, I'm going to my Brush tool, I'm going to select a dappled brush. I'm thinking that one of these dappled brushes that comes shipped with Photoshop, is going to be a good brush to use, and I want to paint with it. But right now, it's going to paint like this if I drag, so I'm just going to undo those. I'm going to go to Window and then brush, and I'm going to set up some brush presets here. Firstly, I'm going to click on brush tip shape and I'm going to increase the spacing, so it's not going to paint in a solid line. I'm going to Shape Dynamics and I'm going to vary the size by adjusting the Size Jitter. Also, going to adjust the Angle Jitter, and I can adjust the Roundness Jitter. That's just going to change each of these brushstrokes. Every time it paints, it's going to paint something a little bit different. Now I'm going to Scattering, I'm going to turn scattering on, on both axes, I'm going to increase my count. This is the sort of thing I'm going to get from this brush, quite a bit of paint for a little bit of effort. I'm just going to go back to this layer and just start putting in some paint strokes. I can vary my blues if I want to, so I can choose different blues to go through here, just to get a sort of interesting background. You can even put some yellows and some pale greens in here. When I'm finished with that, let's just get rid of the brushes palette for a minute, I want to blend this into the layer below. I'm just going to set this to something like Multiply, then I'm going to adjust its Opacity way down, because I just want it to apply as a sort wash. But you can see here what the problem is, is that the wash itself is bleeding through the petals of the flower, so everywhere there's a flower petal within the thing, the wash. You could go and mask this effect out, but that would be really time-consuming. If you changed any of your paint strokes, then you'd need to come back and fix it. I'm going to show you a way that you can do it without having to make masks, and it's fairly simple way to do it. Let's go to this petal. I just want to focus on this petal right now. I'm going to select the layer that the petals on, I'm going to the FX icon and I'm going to click "Blending Options". Then in the Blending Options dialog, what I'm interested in, is this knockout setting, I'm going to open up the panel and choose "Deep". When I do that, can you see that all the bleed through or pretty much all the bleed through is now removed? Going from none to deep, effectively masks out the wash underneath and allows us to create paint on top of it. I'm going to now right-click this layer and choose "Copy last Style" I've got a layer style that I can now apply to all the other layers in the document. I'm going to click on the next of these orange layers, and go all the way up to the top and shift click on the topmost layer. These are all the layers that comprise the painted objects in this illustration. I'm going to Right-click and choose "Paste Layer Style". Now, we've got the benefits of having a wash, but at the same time, not a lot of bleeding into the petals of our flower. The lighter we make the wash, the less effect it's going to have. There's a way of taking a sketchy design in Photoshop, making sure you get a good scan of it and then colorizing it using the tools in Photoshop. Your project for this class is going to be to do the same for either your own sketch, or you're free to download and use the California poppy sketch that I've used here. There's a link to it in the class project area. Post your finished illustration in the project area for us all to see. I hope that you've enjoyed this class, and I hope that you've learnt something about colorizing and scanning art in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this class and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up, this helps other people to identify this as a course that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so, I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.