best way to save inks in digital form

[red7ine]

ok, I'm sure this has been covered countless times. If so, please feel free to just paste the link for me.

what is the best way to save your inks in photoshop to send them to the colorist? I have tried scanning in as lineart, as color, and as greyscale. At large dpi and small dpi, and can never get a satisfactory output.

So, anyone out there who really knows what they are doing, could you give me the step by step process? you know, like you are talking to a moron.. (big stretch, I know)

How do you scan your items in?
What do you do with them when you open it in photoshop? How do you save it?

arrrrgghhh being stoopid makes my brain hurt!

[Mike]

I'd like to add a rider to this.

What tool settings do you digital inkers ink with in Photoshop?
What is a good way to get colorable penciled art as well as inked art via scanner? Do you separate the lines into a new layer or just mask them? How do you do this?

[Robin Riggs]

Originally posted by red7ine
How do you scan your items in?
What do you do with them when you open it in photoshop? How do you save it?

I scan the 11x17 page at 400dpi grayscale. If you have a smaller scanner and are scanning a reduced photocopy then scan at 600dpi. Once it's in Photoshop I go to IMAGE>>ADJUST>>AUTO LEVELS. Then FILTER>>SHARPEN>>UNSHARP MASK. The settings I use are AMOUNT 50%, RADIUS 6.0 pixels, THRESHOLD 1 pixel. Then IMAGE>>ADJUST>>THRESHOLD. Something around 128 will usually be fine but you can fine tune the cutoff between black and white here. It's a ballancing act between the fine lines dropping out and the small spaces filling in. Then IMAGE>>MODE>>BITMAP. And finally I save as a TIFF and check LZW compression. That gives you a nice small file in crisp black and white ready for the colourist.

Hope that helps.

[red7ine]

thanks Robin, you're the bestest. I've printed out your post and taped it to my scanner!

[Dash Martin]

I usually scan my inks in as 1-bit lineart at 600 dpi. Pretty much all the lineart I get from Hi-Fi and other colorists for flatting is a 600 dpi bitmap .tif with the exception of pencilled pages which are 400dpi grayscaled .tif. If I want to post the inks on the net, I convert the 1-bit 600dpi lineart to grayscale and resize it to 72dpi and 500 pixels wide. Works like butta'.

[Mike]

Is a "line art" setting in most scanners generally considered "1-bit", or should I poke around and find a category for this in the scanner controls?

[Jeremy Colwell]

Yes, Mike. 1-bit means that each pixel is either black or white. That works well for ink lines since, hopefully, your lines are only black and the paper is only white. It has to be at the higher resolutions though, otherwise the lines start to pixelate or look blocky.

[eonprez]

I scan my line art in as Line Art at 1200 dpi. It scans in as a bit map but the file size is only about 5 MB per half page (sine I have to scan in half pages.

-Brett
EON

[Tony Moore]

yes, Mike the lineart mode on your scanner is 1-bit black and white. Howver, i've found that sometimes the scans don't have as nice a quality as i would like, as either lines disappear or white areas get filled in, or both. i've found to avoid this, it's best to scan 'em in greyscale at 600 dpi and then convert to 1-bit in photoshop after having adjusted the levels and threshold as Robin described.

it's that extra little bit of time that could mean the difference between a great scan and one that's hardly representative of your work.

-T