Digital Coloring in Photoshop CS2 - Separating the Line Art

I used to do my coloring by taking the b/w line art, using the Magic Wand tool to select an area, and filling it with color. That's great for quick and dirty testing of a color sheet, but let's be honest, it looks like crap and very amateurish when you have white pixel around the edges, and your colors do not fill the space entirely. I have seen too many people pass off this style of colorization of fan-art and web comics.

For the way I'm going to teach you, you need to have Photoshop CS2, either a stylus/tablet or very very good mouse control, and a scanner capable of at least 150 DPI. Oh, you will obviously need line art to scan and color, but maybe you can talk a friend into doing that for you if you do not have the traditional art skills ;)

Okay, so we're going to start by scanning our line art. I first off recommend that you have inked the line art with a thin tip pen. I use 05 0.45 mm Micron Archival pens for this, but any non ball-point pen should work (ball point pens push into the paper and could mess up your scanning if you press too hard). Black should be your color of choice for outlines. Also, when you scan, scan at 150 DPI or above and set up your scanner to get good contrast, you don't want your line art to be light, and don't worry if you don't want to see the line art later, you can always take care of that after you color.

So, once you have scanned your image bring it into Photoshop. You should have a single layer. Some tutorials right now would tell you to use the Magic Wand tool to select all the white areas, invert it, and then slap down some black on a new layer. It never looks good. You end up losing detail and such because of the inaccuracies in the Wand tool. Instead, open up your Channels window (Window-> Channels).

Select only the Blue channel and duplicate it (Right Click -> Duplicate Channel). Select OK at the dialog box, the settings should be fine (in case they aren't, you want it to be Blue Copy and saved in the same document you are working in, not a new document).

Now that your new channel is created, go to your Layers window (Windows -> Layers). Create a new layer (the button next to the trash can in the Layers window which looks like a page corner being turned). You should have your background layer, and a new layer called Layer 1.

Right Click Layer 1 and go to Layer Properties. Rename the Layer as Line Art. As you may have guessed, this will be our new line layer.

Select the layer now called Line Art in the Layers list. We will now create the line art. Go to the Select Menu and choose Load Selection. Make sure the document is your current document, and make sure the Channel is set to Blue Copy. Also, Make sure the Invert box is checked. Also, make sure you have New Selection selected, as we do not want to add or subtract from a current selection (you shouldn't have had anything in the image selected anyway). Press OK.

Your line art selection is now created, but it's still blank. Fill it in with black by going to the Edit Menu and choosing the Fill command. Make sure your color is set to Black, your Mode is Normal, and your Opacity is at 100%. Also, make sure the Preserve Transparency box is unchecked. Then hit OK.

Your line layer is now created, but we're not done yet. Select the Background layer from the Layers window. Go to Select and choose All. Now go back to Edit, choose fill, and keep the setting the same except for color. I usually pick 50% Gray, but you can pick White if you so choose. This layer will not be seen anyway, as it will be covered with your color and shading worn from the next part of this tutorial :)