Expert: Candice Anderson - 6/26/2006

Question
Hi,

Thanks for the fast response!

I'm not sure that I explained clearly though. I don't have a photo at all. I just have the sketch and I want to colour it manually using the sketch as the guide. For example, I have a drawing of a bird, done in pencil. I plan to scan it, play with the contrast to get the sketch sharp, and then I want to take away the white background of the paper the sketch was drawn on so I can just have a "wire" shape as one layer, and a layer behind that which I can add colour on. I hope that makes sense this time!

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Followup To

Question -
I have a selection of sketches that I want to colour by hand on photoshop. My idea was to scan the drawings in then make them transparent somehow so I can layer the drawing over the top of the colour, and then just fill that in in the background. Do you have any ideas? Normally with this type of thing I just select the white with the wand tool and delete but I can't do this with a sketchy line drawing, especially with 25 of them!

Answer -
The easiest thing to do is to scan the photo in and put that on one layer, then put your drawing on another layer.  That way when you are done, all you have to do is turn off the layer so you don't see the drawing anymore (and that gives you the option to go back and edit later :) ) Play with the opacity to make your picture transparent, this is with the layers box.


Candice :)

Answer
hi there,

I say the same thing as I did last time.

Scan your image in (sorry, photo to me means anything, its silly I know) and make that a layer. Take the layer that you scanned and make a copy of it.  turn the orginal off (so that if you make a mistake, you can go back to the original :) )  the copied layer, do your contrast and get rid of the white (i wish there was an easy way to do this besides either the pen tool or the wand tool)  

Then make another layer. This wil be your color layer.  

done :)

If I'm still totally off, email me with the picture, there have been times where I've been off, it is monday after all! :)