Damien Dart
Cleaning Up Scanned Line Art in Adobe Photoshop
- Use adjustment layers to begin cleaning up your line art:
- Remove any non-repro blue underdrawings with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. After choosing the Cyans colour range in the Properties panel, set the saturation to minimum and lightness to maximum.
- Use Curves and/or Levels adjustment layers to improve the line quality and whites, and remove any remaining underdrawings.
- For inked line art, use a Threshold adjustment layer to convert the line art to black-and-white bitmap.
- At the bottom of the Channels palette, click on Load channel as selection to create a selection of the white areas of the image.
- Invert the selection.
- Create a fill layer; the selection will be applied to the fill layer’s mask. Alternatively, use the Paint Bucket tool to fill the selection on a new layer.
- Deselect the selection.
- Delete or hide the scanned artwork and adjustment layers.