Help compensating for my new scanner's lack of auto cleanup.

[Humility]

I just got a newer scanner after my old 3 in one behemoth died. I figured a pure scanner would work much better and although it kind of does, it leaves my pencil drawings looking messy. The other scanner would leave the actual drawings looking rather sharp and auto-remove or fade most of the random spots on the paper.

 

And whatyever it left behind could be removed by sharpening the image twice, setting the paintbucket on global, 50% and clicking a white spot with white paint. Then just turn the rest of the lines pure black with the global paint bucket.

 

But now that doesn't work, it still leaves a huge mess of spots to clean up. So any suggestions on how to get rid of the spots while keeping my lines?

[david.atwell]

Could you post an example?  If the random spots are lighter than the text and lines you want to keep, you can dial up the brightness and contrast until they're gone.

[Humility]

Whoa, that worked like magic. Thanks!

[david.atwell]

Glad to help!

[SAND33P]

The plugins "Make Transparent" and "AAs Assistant" coupled with some layer duplication will also work wonders if things get too messy for brightness / contrast to handle

[Humility]

Hmm... This has umm... has left holes in my lines. I'm going to post a series of images detailing each step I am taking to my current results and ask best way to improve it.

[Humility]

Here are the images and steps.

 

 

Step 1. Base image.

 

 

Step 2. Make Black and white.

 

 

Step 3. Set bright and contrast to 10.

 

 

Step 4. Sharpen twice.

 

 

Step 5.Use the global paint, color white 50%.

 

 

Step 6. Use the color black, global paint 50% on lines to darken them completely.

 

And there you can see my problem. Especially in the vertical lines, the lines look like swiss cheese. I have to Trace each line with the paint brush which is rather time consuming.

[BoltBait]

Try this:

Start with your original image.

Effects > Stylize > Outline

-Move Intensity all the way up

-Adjust line thickness

Adjustments > Black and White

Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast

-Move contrast all the way to the right

-Adjust Brightness down until drawing looks good

[Humility]

That, actually worked pretty good. Won't know absolutely until I color it in but that was way simpler then what I normally do and really effective it looks like.

[Humility]

Found an absolutely most superior way of doing it. Felt I should post it here for anybody searching.

 

I found that Black and white> Max contrast+minimal Brightness>Oil painting with the tiniest brush setting makes it practically perfect.

[david.atwell]

Nice, thanks for reporting back!

 

If you'll post before/after images, sounds like it might be worthy of promotion to Mini-Tut status.  

[Humility]

I'll have to figure out how I'm going to make a before and after image. I'll have to draw some scribbles on a page or something

Edited July 7, 2014 by Humility

[Humility]

Digitally Inking a Pencil Drawing.

 

Before:

 

After:

 

As you can see the starting image is very messy with bleed through and smudges and stuff that doesn'r actually exist but is scanned in anyway.

 

Anyway my steps are

 

1. Click black and white.

 

2. Probably not relevant but for some reason the scanner causes the left edge of my paper to be messier then the rest. So before I can do anything else I have to select that area and lighten it with the 'curves' adjustment. Because its important that the entire image be at the same level of messiness.

 

3. Then I click brightness contrast, bring contrast all the way to the right, brightness to the left. Though sometimes i an image is extra bad I have to make brightness a little less to the left.

 

4. I then use oil painting with brush size and coarseness at minimal. This removes tiny specks and closes tiny gaps in the lines. Most of them at least.  Still far better then anything else I've tried.

Edited July 7, 2014 by Humility