Scanning In and Adjusting Your Drawings Unless you're drawing directly into the computer with a tablet, you're going to need to scan your drawings for a web comic. The whole scanning process can be a bit frustrating if you've never done it before, so I thought I'd guide you through some helpful tips so that you can have the best images possible to show on the web. For the purposes of this tutorial, I'm using my own scanner (with the VistaScan program). Even if you've got a different program or scanner, it should have all of the bells and whistles I use in this article, even if they're not in the same location. I've got a sketch here that I doodled on the back of some other piece of paper and now want to scan it in. Upon starting your scanning software, you'll be able to preview your image on the glass and scan away. Before you start though, it may be helpful to know some important features on your scanner and the best way to scan in your image: DPI: Dots Per Inch. If you're printing your image out, then scanning them in at 300-600 dpi is recommended. Internet stuff should always be scanned or resized to 72 dpi before you upload it. Anything more than that and your files are going to take up more memory than they need to. Having a fast loading picture on the internet can make the difference between someone seeing your work, or just giving up and not coming back. Mode: I draw most of my work in black and white and then color it in Photoshop. However, there are different ways to scan in B&W work. If you want simple black lines that are easy to color, go for B&W Document mode (and make sure you've inked your work or drawn it very dark). If you've done subtle shading or such, try Greyscale instead. Obviously, if your original is in color, scan it in color :) You can mess with Brightness and Contrast settings on the scanner until your eyes bleed, but I generally find it easier to adjust the look of the image in Photoshop. It's better to scan your work a little darker than it actually is, rather than lighter. You can't put the detail back into a washed out scan, but you can easily lighten dark areas of a darker one. Initial scanned image Okay, here's the scanned and cropped image on the left. It's kind of dark, but it's all there. Here's where it all comes together quickly in Photoshop. Zoom in on your image and go to a magical little tool under the Image menu called Adjust>Levels. This is the best way that I've found to clear up your images (especially in B&W). Here's a shrunk down look at what you'll see when you pull this tool up: Image > Adjust > Levels It looks complicated, but it's actually very simple. Just go over to these buttons: Click on the Black dropper and point it at a spot on your drawing that should be absolute black. If your image is too dark already, this may not even be neccessary. Click on the White dropper and click on a spot that's supposed to be white. In the example on the right, I actually clicked the White Dropper on some of that text that creeped through from the other side of my doodle page. By making that middle grey tone the lightest part (with the White Dropper), it's made all of the text vanish and taken away all the dim grey from the image. Once that's done, I can move around the drawing and touch it up with the Eraser, Pencil or Paintbrush tools. All of this preparation may seem annoying, but prepping your drawing before you color makes things a heck of a lot better and gives you a more professional output. Also, tons of grey tones in a drawing takes up more memory which means a slower download for people trying to see your work. A bad scan makes everything else down the line more difficult. Before White Dropper After White dropper Once I'm done cleaning up, I save my progress as a .tif or .jpg (as always, remember to save often). Here's the finished scan, ready for coloring: Finished Scan Unlike the example on the left, I highly recommend the following method for a lot of the clean black line web comics I've seen on the web: - Scan your work as a 400dpi Greyscale image. - Bring the image into Photoshop and adjust the Brightness/Contrast and Levels as shown above until you're pleased with the look of it. - Go to Image>Mode and change your image to a B/W Document to remove all the unnecessary greys. A straight black and white image is way easier to color and takes up substantially less memory. - Go to Image>Mode and change the image back to Greyscale so you can save it in a variety of formats. - Go to Image>Image Size and change the dpi to 72. - Save in whatever format you prefer (jpeg or gif usually). - From here you can color the work (by changing the Mode to RGB or CMYK color) or leave it just black and white if that's your preference. In the future, I may post another tutorial on minimizing file sizes... but this should help get you started anyways. Questions or comments? Feel free to E-Mail me. Related Links: Comic Colors: Comic Coloring Tutorials and Resources Deke McClelland: Auto Rotation In Photoshop Home / Archive / About / History / Tutorials / Praise The Makeshift Miracle is hosted on Keenspace, a free webhosting and site automation service for webcomics.