Quick Trick: Digitize and Isolate your Line Art in Photoshop

1. Class Trailer: If you like to draw traditionally and you want to digitize and isolate your line art. This quick trick is going to save your sanity. All you will need is photoshop and a way to photograph or scan your drawing. I recommend this class for students of intermediate level who are familiar and comfortable with photoshop. By the end of this quick trick, you will have isolated your line art, which you then can work on digitally, either to paint under the lines or to just have a cleaner nicer. Let's go. 2. Breakdown of the Project: This quick check will give you super pretty, digitized linear. And while you sure didn't need my help to draw it, I would still love to see what you end up doing with it. Well, here is how it is done. Step one, photograph or scan your drawing. The better the quality, the less challenging the following will be. Step two, in photoshop, level out the whites and darks, clean up the artwork and remove any under drawing. Step three, by making use of the Alpha channel, isolate the line. Step four, well, there is none, but I'm sure you're ending up with gorgeous clean line. Okay. So if you don't mind, I would love to see your artwork, share it with us and get each other inspired. And if you ran into any specific issues, I would love to read about them and how you managed to solve them or if you didn't know how I can actually help you. Now, let us dive in by preparing the file. 3. Preparation: Scan or Photo: So you got your drawing on paper. If you have a scanner, use it to make a high resolution scan. This means 300 DPI minimum. Otherwise, take a picture. Lay the sketchbook or paper flat and take the picture from as straight above as possible. Try to light the paper as evenly and softly as you can. Daylight without direct sunlight works best. Overhead lambs or ring lights can give a great result too. Once you're done, save it on your computer and open it in photoshop so we can move on to the next step. 4. Isolating Lineart in Photoshop : Scan. Usually give the best result. So I will show you the steps with the scan as an example first. I will get into details for pictures that might require a bit more complex process in the extra tips. Once you open a JPEG or something like that in photoshop, the layer will be locked when you open the file. Duplicate it and work off of the duplicate to preserve your steps. First, add a curves adjustment layer. Use the eye dropper tool within the menu that pops up to define the white of the paper as well white. Use the eye dropper within the menu to define the black of the line in its darkest place as black. This might need some trial and error to hit the right pixels and find the desired result. But you got this. Once you're happy with it, add a hue saturation adjustment layer to bring down the saturation or use a black and white adjustment layer to eliminate any color. I like the work non destructive. So to preserve my progress, I select all and copy visible and paste in place. To get the best results, you might want to apply another curse adjustment layer and define whites by eye dropping on the light grayish lines potentially left from the first pass. Also, readjust the black tones as needed. Select all and copy visible. Now, add an empty layer and fill with black. Turn on the alpha mask and paste. The drawing will appear red on black. When you press Q again to disable the Alpha mask. It will select all outlines, and you can press delete to remove all remaining black in the layer. And, you have successfully isolated your outlines. Congrats. I like to zoom in and check up if the linit needs any more cleaning up, which I will do by applying a mask to the layer and painting in it with black. And this should give you a very nice final result. The next video is dedicated to some extra tips for when your original file isn't a best case scenario. 5. Extra Tips: The process for photograph drawing is mainly the same as before. You might, however, have to adjust for bad lighting, fuzzy photo results and the like. Here are some tips, how you can approach that. If, for instance, you have uneven lighting in your picture. You can try cutting the picture apart and applying the adjustment layers, saturation, curves, and levels to different parts of the image. You can also duplicate and mask the image or part of it. But that feels more complicated to me, so I just cut and paste parts. In my example here, you can see a lot of warmer tones on the right and a lot of cooler tones on the left. So I split the photo like this. The quality of my shot is also not the best, but it's good enough for the purpose of posting it online, for instance. I would not use it to process the result into high resolution print or something like that, though. Be mindful of what you want to use the artwork for and handle it accordingly. Sometimes it can make sense to work on parts of the image and copy paste visible before moving on to the other parts to level the field, so to speak. If you're feeling you're not getting a good result, consider retaking the picture under better conditions if possible. 6. Using the Isolated Lineart: You probably already had some ways in mind to use the isolated line art, but here's how I usually make use of it. You can color the lines itself, turn an alpha lock or add a clipping mask. You can add shading. You can paint underneath. 7. Some Final Words: This is the end of the quick trick. Thank you for tagging along. I hope it has been helpful. Remember to share your pretty art, your insights, and moments of success, and please leave a review to help your fellow students and me. Thank you again and you next time.