the “oh shit i drew lineart on the same layer as my sketch” tutorial

(also applicable to getting coloured sketch lines off of a scanned image, and making scanned lineart transparent)

in the last few days i’ve seen like three people with this problem?? and it is such an easy mistake to make and annoying to correct if you don’t know the trick so here is a post starring this frog i found on youtube today about how to get rid of it fast + easy

ok so i’ve fucked this up really bad. worse than you have probably ever done. he is all on one layer with weird colours. DON’T PANIC EVERYTHING WILL BE OK

first you have to play with the saturation. make it as bright as possible; your eyes will hate you but it will be over soon. turning it up all the way tends to compromise your line quality a bit, which i don’t think would matter much if you work big and size down later, but harold’s poor cute face is noticably more pixellated and terrible when i turn it up to 100. probably best to do it manually with adjustments > hue/saturation and zoom in while you are adjusting to make sure it’s not eating your lines.

your make a new layer on top of it, fill it with PURE red or blue (green does not work for some reason) and set that layer to HUE. then you merge that layer with your lineart/sketch.

now he looks like this!! you have succeeded so far in making your drawing look like unicorn puke, and then you made it look slightly less sinful, but still bad. i have tricked you. there is no hope left

UNTIL YOU DO THIS. go to channels and click on the colour you picked. now all those coloured lines appear to be GONE. but we are not quite done yet. go to the bottom window and click this

and hit Ctrl + Shift + I to select all the visible lines in the image. THEN click RGB again (so that you aren’t working in shades of grey + blue/red anymore), switch back to the layer panel, and make another new layer. then fill that layer with black, or whatever colour you want your lineart to be. now deselect and delete/hide your sketch. you are now a wizard. YOU HAVE WON. HAROLD IS FREE FROM HIS TORMENTED LIFE ATTACHED TO THE BACKGROUND LAYER. HE CAN BE THE FROG HE WAS ALWAYS MEANT TO BE. CONGRATULATIONS.

simonist:

[This is off one of Neonnoodle’s posts from SomethingAwful, but it’s such a useful technique I wanna repost it here.]

Here’s one approach I’ve found, which is based on the gamut mask idea, but a little simpler and tuned to working in PS:

1. Start with three color swatches: a red/magenta of some kind, a yellow of some kind, and a blue/cyan of some kind. They don’t have to be crayon-box “red” “yellow” “blue” — the nice thing here is that you can decide how warm or cool you want the overall cast of the color to be. So, for instance, you could pick a cool yellow, a purplish red, and an electric blue. Or a very orange red, a warm yellow, and a greenish blue. Or even substitute green for blue. Experiment here. Even colors which are completely hideous will mellow out, so don’t be afraid.

 

2. Draw your 3 swatches in a tight triangle so that they are bumping up against each other in the center. Then use a smudge tool with scattering on for a blender, and blend the edges of each color into each other:

 
(I also had pressure set so I wouldn’t blend too hard, but that’s optional. Scattering is the important one.)

3. Now you have a neutralized color wheel. The closer toward the center you go, the more neutral the palette becomes:

 
 
 

(here they all are against 50% gray)
 

4. Now you can start establishing the values for the colors you might want to use. Use the L (Lightness) with Lab sliders on the color panel (even if you’re using RGB or CMYK color for your document) because “Brightness” (HSB) is a load of horseshit.

 

5. By the way, here’s what the color wheels from those other colors from the beginning would look like:

 

And one other with more swatches:

This is so neat, you can take the ugliest red/blue/yellow combination possible and get a really nice, cohesive palette from it with this technique.

reblogging cause i know a lot of artists follow me and they might get a kick out of playing around with this

p.s. USE A TEXTURED BRUSH TO SMUDGE, it works far, far better than a solid circle. I don’t know what Neondoodle used but I tired with the watercolour brushes I abuse constantly nowadays and it works pretty good.