Onward from Part 4 of my Inking Section
After inking my comic, Incident at the Game Store, I make some touch ups to the pages to prepare for coloring! I split this section from my inking part, so it won’t stretch so long.
If you’re up to having a signed physical book for yourself, you can stop by my Etsy store and grab a copy!
To start, I scan my pages in any scanner that can scan a Portable Document Format (PDF) at 600 dpi and I use Photoshop to import the PDF pages.
I scan it in Color, Greyscale and Black and White Modes for coverage. But I generally use the color scans, so I have more control over the gray before I work them down to black and white.
When you open the PDF in Photoshop, the image files separate. I prefer to pull them into one document, with each page in different layers. This will make it faster to resize and adjust for the print margins!
I use Multiply Layer mode to help me align my artwork, so it’s consistent to crop and align for lettering.
All the layers are on the Multiply Layer style mode: meaning the lighter colors of the layer are clear while the darker ones are solid.
Next, I crop the page for coloring, adjusting to the comic paper’s trim line for later printing. Don’t fret too much about making it perfect, as it’s difficult to get them all aligned like that in the first place.
Here’s a page that’s now cropped.
From here, use Image>Adjustments>Hue and Saturation to clear the blue pencil sketches. Use the Cyan and Blue dropdown settings to only affect the blue pencil work. Push down the Saturation Bar, then push up the Brightness Bar. This will keep as much gray tone as possible to not destroy my blacks too much.
I then work with my Image>Adjustments> Levels to bring up the contrast of blacks and whites. Doing as little as I can to not destroy too much of the thinner lines.
More Level editing as I try to make my blacks deeper.
This is the panel of art so far. Now it’s time for more intricate edits.
This next process is simpler. Use the round brush and tools for a pressure sensitive, size changing brush tool with a white color to clean up stray lines and specks.
The scan caught my paper edits, so I need to clean them up. I use the Lasso tool to move parts of the background lettering to realign the sign letters.
I work on the mall kiosk line art to realign it to something normal.
Continue with my Brush tool to clean up mistakes I didn’t catch with in the ink drawings.
Here is the entire page so far! The same process is used for working with the rest of my scanned ink art. Time to prep this page for future coloring!
First, I adjust the art to be completely black and white with no gray by using Image>Adjustments>Threshold.
Adjustment to make sure thinner lines don’t disappear too much.
Select >Color Range, then select the white color anywhere.
This will select every pixel in the image with that white color.
I make a New Layer (Shift+Ctrl+N) and Fill (Shift+F5) in a Black color, making a layer with only the black line art. In general, I do this process with all the pages. You can also get away with putting your line art Layer Blend Mode to Multiply. But you’d miss out on the flexibility of editing your lines, including the ability to color them without affecting your normal colors.
Here are all page comparisons, from initial scan to final touches!
