Photoshop tutorial - how to get rid of white space in a scanned line drawing quickly

[RAJillustration]

I made a post with lots of pictures (because the process is a little tricky) on how to get that white space out of a scanned line drawing so that it can be used as an independant layer, and so that you can change the color of the line, and draw underneath the line in a different layer that will not effect the drawing itself.

http://thisisnotacraft.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-make-white-transparent-on-line.html

there's a lot of ways to do this, too. How do you do it?

[Former_Member]

Hi PthaloAzul,

great post! That is something very useful to a lot of people.

When I want to work with pencil or ink drawings in Photoshop I usually just use the layer blending modes (overlay works nicely) in conjunction with transparency slider. If I need to intensify the darkness of the line work I will create a duplicate of the layer and use the multiply blending mode. What I like most about it is that is is completely non-destructive.

...just one more way to get the job done...

Alex

[JoyMerrymanStore]

Oooo, how fun! I have one :-)

For line art - I use the Magic Wand tool (it's part of the quick selection tool)
I set the tolerance for about 150 but if it picks up too much gray around the edges or not enough detail I'll play around with that number a little. Then I click on a dark part of a line and the selection is automatically made including just the lines of the image without any of the white spaces. Then I hit command J (I'm using a mac) to copy the selection to a new layer. Now I have 2 layers - The background layer is the original image and if you click the little eye off you will see that the new layer is transparent around the lines.
To change color - I use command U (or Hue/Saturation found under Image/Adjustments. First I select a color. Then "command U" and select the checkbox that says colorize. Then I adjust the lightness and saturation sliders until I like it. All of the neat line variations are maintained. Click OK.

:-D

[Former_Member]

Hi JoyMerrymanPaperie.

good one!

I don't use the magic wand nearly enough. A lot of those rough selection edges can also get cleaned up by using the selection modifiers, like feather, smooth.

[JoyMerrymanStore]

Alex - So true! Refine Edge is my friend.

There are so many usefull tools that I forget to use or don't know about yet. It's embarrassing, how much time I spent trying to erase all of the white from the first image I played with in Photoshop.

[cutependants]

In Gimp you can go color to alpha(channel)-->
a menu pops up, choose white as the color, and presto! the white area becomes transparent alpha channel.
Having said that, I will also say I love this thread- I have already found found 10 new things to try just reading it so far!