Which different techniques are there for coloring scanned sketches?

[zzacmann]

Theres many different ways of going about it. Heres how I usually work.

1. Scan in the sketch at high res, around 300 or so.

2. Select> Color Range and select the darkest marks of the drawing. Play around with fuzzyness so that basically all of the pencil or pen marks will be selected. Hit OK to make the selection. Now make a new layer and Edit> Fill the selection with black.
Now you have some nice outlines to work with. Always work under this layer. Make all your coloring below this layer.

3. Now you can go in and color the areas of the sketch. Usually I have a different layer for each color so I can easily change them later.

4. As far as shading. My favorite technique is to control select the layer with the object I want to shade so just that color becomes selected. Now make a new layer and fill the selected area with 50% grey. Now thats going to be the shading layer. Change that grey layer to Overlay. Now with a soft brush set to a very low opacity, around 10 - 20, color in black where you want shadows and paint white where you want highlights. The good thing about making your shadows and highlights on a seperate layer is that you can blur and change the opacity of just the shading to really fine tune your results.

5. As far as skin goes, add a red layer and a blue layer. Confused? Yes, remember to lightly paint the red tones on the skin and a light warm blue looks better for skin shading than black or the orange you'll get by using the burn tool.

This is basically the technique I used for the few Daily Sketch Challenges I did. You can check them out. I did like number 1 through 15 or 20 or so.

[mdwsr]

(snip..
4. As far as shading. My favorite technique is to control select the layer with the object I want to shade so just that color becomes selected. Now make a new layer and fill the selected area with 50% grey. Now thats going to be the shading layer. Change that grey layer to Overlay. Now with a soft brush set to a very low opacity, around 10 - 20, color in black where you want shadows and paint white where you want highlights. The good thing about making your shadows and highlights on a seperate layer is that you can blur and change the opacity of just the shading to really fine tune your results.
...end snip)


Excellent stuff there z, I have a ? on #4. I assume by the way that you described that you paint each color on a different layer? I tried cntl/selecting a layer and it selects all pixels on that layer.

[zzacmann]

Yes, I control select the layer with the color I want to shade. I then create a new layer above this and while the pixels on the previous layer are still selected, I do a Edit > Fill 50% Gray. I do this because if I didn't have a shape selected the Fill operation would fill that entire layer with 50% Gray. Switching this layer to overlay and painting it with black and white would actually get the exact same results that I want, but if I accidentally paint outside the colored area I want to shade, other layers below will get shaded as well, and I may not want this.

Keeping the shaded area pixels selected while shading allows me to shade right up to the edge of the color area without going outside the border and accidentally shading a lower layer too.

I hope that made as much sense as it does in my head.

[KawaTaki]

Thanks alot, that sounds great, though I would really want a tutorial if anyone has one, with step-by-step and images? Just to make it easier for me to learn it :P. And see how the result could turn out aswell. Anyone? Also I would like to have some variety to see which one fits me best.

[mdwsr]

Ill take a stab at this. Using zac's method described above I took some elements from an image I started a few weeks ago and never finished. This is a work in progress.

I started with a sketch I did with a 2 pixel hard brush: black on transparent background. When I had the basic shape laid out I made 3 layer sets below this sketch, the top being the left wall with a 50% gray layer above set to overlay. The second had the same overlay layer over the right wall. The third the same and the floor was on bottom. On bottom as usual I had 2 layers, one filled white the other black. I do this only for contrast and I can turn them on and off for a contrasting background which makes it easier for me to see what I'm doing above.

On the top image is the image with only the basic shapes and colors, the second image has the overlay 50% gray layers applied with some shading.

This was an excellent tip, it made alot of things much easier for me. I have been trying to shade with color shades on an individual layer. Doing it like this makes it easy to fine tune, and even to make big changes without having to start all over. I did do mine slightly different than zac but the mainly because I tend to use the pen tool to draw in my shapes, then it's easy to to turn that shape into a selection to bound the shade strokes. Maybe someone can suggest more but this really helped me.

No shading:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v505/mdwsr/caveNoShade.jpg

Shaded with overlay layer:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v505/mdwsr/caveShade.jpg

Here's the latest path and layer version:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v505/mdwsr/tools.jpg

[paulselhi]

Have a look at the adobe site there is or used to be a pdf for d/l about coloring an image. I of course would recomend our s/w :wise: but if you HAVE to use PS then layers is the way to go

We also ahe a PS tut for this on our site ( shame adobe don't reciprocate !!)

http://www.black-and-white-to-color.com/articles/

[Imriela]

Setting the lineart layer to "Multiply" works quite nicely, too, and sometimes it's a better choice than "Overlay."

[lanternkid]

Myuu, I uses the Multiply layer mode. If you're wanting to have your lines a colour other than black, you might want to try sommat else though. Especially if your colour layers are going underneath the lineart, cuz they'll darken it.

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