How To Paint Line Art In Photoshop

As i so many times promised, here is a full description of how to color line-art drawings in photoshop. I will use an illustration most of you know from Ora's course. I will also write this post in english, as most Photoshop terms are in english, not to mention that wordpress works much better with images that way

Instructions

1. Scan your image ( you will usually do it in 300 dpi resolution). it doesn't really matter what color mode. I recommend applying levels to make the lines cleaner and getting the paper white as much as possible

2. Covert the image to RGB ( image->mode->RGB color).

3. Desaurate the image to create a black, white and greys by clicking CTRL+SHIFT+U ( or Image->Adjustments->Desaturate).

4. Enter the Channels Palette. While holding the CTRL button, left click on the Blue Channel thumbnail. This will create a selection. If you are working on a very faint image, like pencil drawing, don't be alarmed if the selection looks wierd or incomplete.

5. Inverse the selection by clicking CTRL+SHIFT+I ( or Select-> Inverse).

6. In the Layers Palette, create a new layer by clicking on the New Layer button at the bottom ( or Layer->New->Layer). Select the new layer you have just created.

7. Now we have a new layer and a selection. All we need to do is fill it. Hit the D button to make the foreground color black, and click ALT+BACKSPACE. There are alot of other ways to fill, but this is the shortest one by far.

Tada! you have the line art in a new layer, with all the transparencies preserved, creating a natural anti-aliasing with layers below it, while none of the quality is reduced. A good way to continue will be to create a flat white layer just below it, to see what you are working on.

What can i do now and why Omer claims this techniques so good?

2 reason. From now on, all the coloring you will do will be in the layers BELOW the line-art layer, so coloring can be very free without restrictions of Multiply modes.

Second, changing the line colors will become very easy:

1. create a new layer ABOVE the line-art layer. Select new layer.

2. Hit ALT+CTRL+G. The new layer will be "attache" in a fashion called Clipping Mask ( or Group in old Photshop versions). This method will ensure that the bottom layer ( in our case, the line-art layer), will perform as a MASK for the top layer. So now painting in the top layer will be visible only in the lines, the non-transparent part of the image (: