Cleaning and Separating Your Line Art in Photoshop (Layers method)
by Ricky Bryant

Hola and salutations art geeks. Today I’m going to make my “voluntary” contribution to the Scribbleclick community with a quick tutorial on preparing your line art for coloring in Photoshop.

SCAN YOUR DRAWING

CLEAN UP

Go to the IMAGE menu and scroll to ADJUSTMENTS > LEVELS

Here you will adjust the amounts of black, grey and whites in your image by moving the 3 arrows left and right. You’ll usually be toying with the left and right arrows more, as they control the darkest blacks and the whitest whites.

FINAL STEP?…

Okay, at this point you can theoretically do one more step and then proceed to color.

If you go to your layers palette, and go to the pull down menu for the image layer and set the layer type to Multiply, you can then put color on layers underneath the original. Any part of the image that is white will essentially be transparent.

While this technically can work, there’s one major downside to this method.

If somewhere down the line you need to erase your line art, doing so will also erase any white in the original background, revealing what is (or isn’t) under that layer. You can work around this, but its a lot of tedious and unnessacary clean up that will just slow you down.

That said, I’ll show you a few more steps to take in order to give you clean lines on a transparent layer.

SEPARATING YOUR LINEART

After adjusting your levels in Step 2 and getting a clean set of blacks and whites, go to your CHANNELS window.

Hold the Ctrl key and click on any of the channels, it doesn’t matter which one. Doing this will automatically select all the white areas in the picture.

From here select the Magic Wand or Lasso tool, Right-click and select SELECT INVERSE. This will then select all the things that…aren’t white. In this case, your lines.

With the selection still active, click on your foreground/background color palette (the two colored squares on your tools window) and set your foreground color to black and your background to white.

Return to your layer window and create a new layer named “lineart”…or whatever you want. On this layer, go to the EDIT menu and select FILL.Here you’ll fill this layer with your FOREGROUND COLOR. Now, deselect the layer you just filled in, create one more layer under that, and go EDIT > FILL > BACKGROUND COLOR. This will put a clean white background to work with if needed.

Finally, delete your original scanned image. Or keep it and just turn off the opacity if you want to refer to it later or something.

Now if you understood all of that, you should now have two layers: one with a set of black lines on a transparent background and one layer with a solid white color.

With this setup, you can freely color under your line art and still edit your lines without compromising the rest of your background elements.

WHAT’S THIS ABOUT COLORED PENCILS?

Now let’s say you’ve got an inked piece whose original pencils were done with red or blue pencils. You can still use the aforementioned method, but there are a few additional steps to take.

With your scanned image, go to your channels menu. Here you’re going to delete certain color channels depending on what you’re original pencils are. In this case if they are red or blue pencils, leave those particular color channels be.

Doing this will eliminate your color pencils leaving behind only black and white, but will also change your image type to Multichannel (…not entirely sure what that entails).

Go to IMAGE>MODE>GRAYSCALE. Here you can adjust your levels and then change the mode to RGB or CMYK (whichever you like to use). From there, just follow the line separation method.

Happy coloring!