Line Art
Scanning:
The first step, of course, is to scan your picture. When you acquire the picture, you should scan it at a fairly large size; I scan mine at 300 dpi. Having a larger area to work with will help a great deal when it comes to detail.
Also, I’d like to note that if you’re colouring someone else’s line art, then it’s a good idea to increase the size to once again, make detail easier.
Line Quality:
Adobe Streamline - You can do a step further in fixing your line art by putting it through streamline. This turns the lines into smooth vectors which you can drop back into Photoshop.
Line Layer:
Step 2 - Next press “Alt + Backspace.” Usually the line art will turn white; however, it’s perfectly fine if it doesn’t.
Step 3 - Click on the “Layers” window and create two new layers. You can delete the original layer because you don’t need it anymore. Do NOT deselect the selected area.
Step 4 - On the top layer, press “Alt + Backspace.” Deselect the selected area and rename the layer “lines.”
Now your lines are on their own layer. This gives you much more freedom in colouring than if you colour on one layer.
You don’t want to colour using a raw scan, so it’s time to clean up the lines. Go to the tool bar and click on “Image,” “Adjustments,” then “Levels;” figuring out the levels option is easy. Once you have your line art nice and dark while the rest is white, click on “Image,” “Adjustments,” then “Desaturate.” Here you can fix blemishes in your picture.
Step 1 - Select the “Channels” window and click the “Create new Channel” button. Hold down the Control button and click on the “Blue” channel. This will select the white parts of the picture. To select the black parts, invert it by pressing “Control + Shift + I.”
