Scanning Images

This Week I'd like to go over scanning in an image and preparing it for colouring in Photoshop. I'll be explaining how I do it, not the only way to do it, and probably not even the best way. But as far as I know, it produces the best results for me.

First thing is first, Scanning the image in:

I always find it best to scan an image in using a high DPI (around 300) that way we can make edits and shrink the image down, which normally makes it look a lot smoother. If you are drawing in ink, or really dark pencil and want a black line drawing by the end of it, Then scan in black and white. if you have a pencil sketch I find it's normally best to scan it in grey-scale. 

Then were going to load the file into Photoshop, the image is going to appear big and grainy at first, thats ok, just means were doing it correct up till now.

Were going to clean the page up a little bit by using the threshold option.

By moving the slider back and forth we can decide how black a line has to be, to be kept. It lets you get rid of stray pencil lines and smudges, but don't go too far or it'll start to eat up your lines. You'll just have to play around with it to get the result you'd like.

Here is one of the images getting cleaned up, I forgot to change my brightness to eliminate pencil lines.

The next step is to do any editing you'd like to do, either erasing lines, or adding them. If your going to add lines I'd recommend using the pencil tool at this point and pick a size that won't look out of place. (It will still be grainy but don't worry. At least it will match)

I'm sorry about the music, it cracked me up so I had to use it.

Once you've edited the image and cleaned it up we can colour it. You don't have to do this now, you can do it after we have shrunk the image. We're going to create a new layer and place it below our original one, you might need to double click the background layer to unlock it, then were going to change the background layers style to darken. This will let us put colours on layers underneath and have them still show through the white, but not the black.

I'd recommend saving our big image as image_clean.psd and then using the save-as option to save again as image_shrunk.psd (that way we can't make any mistakes and accidentally save over it). The last step is going to be changing the resolution to 125 dpi (it's really your own preference), go to "Image" - "Image Size..." and enter the dpi you'd like.

And there we have it... you should have a good looking image, scanned in and looking smooooth.