AboutScott Valentine Expertise Author, "Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4 (Peachpit)". Beginning to expert questions for Photoshop CS3 and CS4 Extended, including 3D capabilities. I am also an expert here for Digital Photography. Please - NO questions on Lightroom, Elements, Express or versions earlier than CS2. These questions will be discarded.
Experience Author, "Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4" (available from Peachpit.com in January, 2009). I have been a professional level user since 1999, and have used Photoshop for photography, fine art, graphic design, web design, and technical image analysis. I have also conducted classes at the college level in both artistic and technical uses. I am currently an Adobe User Group manager.
Organizations National Association of Photoshop Professionals, Los Alamos Multimedia Users Group.
Publications CommunityMX.com, Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4 (Adobe Press).
Education/Credentials Bachelor's degree, Physics
Awards and Honors Several awards for digital photography.
Question QUESTION: Hi! I have Photoshop CS3 and am needing a lot of help in figuring out how to make my hand drawings that I scan into Photoshop into a printable digital stamp. These "stamps" are very popular in the paper crafting community. To get an idea of what I'm talking about you can visit here to see some that are for sale:
What I am specifically needing my image to be is 300dpi, have a transparent background, and be saved into a JPG and PNG format for printing. My drawings are line art, and I need the lines to print very black and clear, so any editing of the image to make the lines look good and not show any imperfections is required.
I have figured out how to scan my drawing directly into Photoshop and how to set the dpi, but beyond that I am lost. Please assume that I know nothing and explain it as detailed as possible as my knowledge of Photoshop or working with this type of thing is practically zero. I hope you can help me! Thank you:)
ANSWER: Hi Leah,
Cleaning up these drawings can take a lot of time, more than actually drawing them in an illustration program to begin with. So, the first solution I'd suggest that you try is to 'trace' your drawings in Photoshop using the Pen Tool.
The Pen Tool is a vector-based tool, which means you can draw a 'path' that is editable - you can adjust it easily after you've drawn it. After you have positioned it, you can apply a 'stroke' to it which will simulate a brush stroke to varying degrees. If you find yourself doing this a lot, you'd be well-advised to consider a vector-based application like Illustrator or CorelDraw. This solution offers you the most flexibility, and eventually you could make your drawings directly on the computer with one of these applications and a digital tablet (look for Wacom tablets to get more information on these devices).
As for actually cleaning up the image, you will need to be familiar with Channel Operations. Channels separate the colors into levels of gray, with white being no color, and black being fully saturated. Combining levels of gray from each channel equates to blending colors. The reason this is important is that you can isolate different areas of your drawings and make 'masks' for editing.
Beyond that, you will need to be able to use something like the Levels or Curves adjustment layers. These help you increase or decrease specific regions of color or brightness. From there, you can also work on masks.
So, both of these tools help with masking, but you may not be familiar with masks... A mask is a modifier for a layer that controls transparency (or opacity). You paint on a mask to control what parts of a layer are visible or invisible. Invisible areas will show the contents of layers beneath them.
Masks are very important to these selection processes because they allow you to work without erasing or damaging the pixels in your image. Simply erasing the background causes those pixels (image data) to disappear - you can not adjust those regions once they are erased. Using a mask lets you go back and change things later, and you can work progressively (meaning you don't have to continue making selections until you have everything).
There really is an awful lot to cleaning up line drawings, and it will take more space than I have here to explain it really well. If you are interested in either of the approaches above (drawing on the computer or cleaning up), let me know and I will follow up with some links that should help a lot.
Take care,
-Scott
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QUESTION: Hi Scott. Thank you so much for your timely answer, I really appreciate it. I would love any links you have to cleaning up line drawings. And to clarify what kind of line art I am doing, in case it makes a difference, it is very simple, open images with no shading and not a ton of detail. The images are meant to be printed out and colored in by hand. Anything you think would help I'd appreciate and thank you again.
Answer Hi Leah,
Here are some links to cleaning up the scanned drawings:
However, I highly recommend that you consider using the Pen Tool as noted above, if you already have Photoshop. You can scan your work in, then use the pen tool to 'trace' the images. This is probably the best solution for you since you note that there is no shading and low detail. Here's a starter tutorial for using the Pen Tool:
The article is not free, so you can also enter the following terms into Google if you don't mind hunting around a little:
Photoshop "pen tool" tutorial
Another option for you is to consider an actual vector application like Illustrator, or the open-source Inkscape. I haven't used the latter, so I'm not sure if you can scan directly into Inkscape for tracing. However, as you get more comfortable with using the application (either one), you can begin to draw in your illustrations directly.
