The VG Resource

I could use some advice. I was looking around and saw some people showing people some people showing their steps at making pictures. I noticed how well their lines come out after they scan a drawing. Unfortunately for me whenever I scan a picture my lines come out crappy take a look.

As you can see, all the smudges and erased lines are viable. I usually have to go through a long tedious process to clean it up, but even after that it still is pretty sloppy looking. Normally I just trace over it but I want to know how I can just take the original lines and work with them.

I posted this on Deviantart and they suggested that I used dark ink or something. The results were pretty good.

However, I was still wondering what you guys think? What do you guys suggest?

Photoshop. Levels. To get rid of the gray and make your lines more crisp.

Yes I do stuff like that on Photoshop. Could you elaborate more?

1. Open picture in photoshop.
2. make a new layer above the picture
3. re-draw your lines (in pixels) in this new layer
4. delete the bottom layer so you're only left with your pixels
5. clean up the lines.

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either that, or you could try putting the picture into mspaint and changing the image attributes to black and white
I'm not sure how well that'd work out for you, though.

I predominantly use pens, which as most know, usually don't erase. Erasable pens in my experience suck.

How I used them was:

Draw in red pen
Do the good lines in Blue or Black
Scan the image into Photoshop
Go to the Red Alpha Channel (thusly the red lines blend into the white)
Select all, inverse, paint bucket black on a new layer (Select everything on the Red-Alpha channel, which selects all the white at whatever strength)
Back a background white layer, merge with the black layer made from the Red-Alpha
Go to 'Levels' and tweak the image
If necessary, tweak with Contrast settings.

I generally liked the results I got from that. I use Red pens as the sketch colour because red ink is lighter than blue or green, and it is thusly far less from 255 of that colour. Its not perfect, but its a neat trick.

Yeah, I do that, but with blue.