What is the difference in setting up line art for color?

[Hollingsworth]

You can make a selection of any channel by either control (command for you Mac people?) clicking on the channel image in the channel palette or using the dotted circle at the bottom of the channels palette. Likewise, you can make a selection of the contents of a layer by control clicking on the image of that layer in your layer palette.

If you want to color with lineart on a channel, you do it like this real quick:

If your lineart is bitmap, make it grayscale. When it's still in grayscale mode, drag and drop that grayscale channel onto the icon at the bottom of your channel palette that's called "create new channel". This will duplicate it. Now convert to RGB or CMYK. Now your extra channel has your lineart as duplicated from it while it was grayscale. On the RGB or CMYK channels, now fill white. Click on the eyeball of your extra channel holding your lineart and you're good to go.

If you then wanted to put that lineart onto a layer, you can control/click that image icon in your channel palette of that channel. This will make a selection of that channel. Now create a new layer and fill the selection with black. Set to Multiply.

Easy.

[SeanE]

Blue channel will not always be 100% opaque using that method, depending on your color profile. It's a terrible habit that you should think about changing.

If I knew how I would - so what's another way of making the lineart separate on a transparent layer of its own? Your demo in the link above just says to do it but not how

Put your line art into a channel (select all, copy, create new channel, paste)
create new LAYER
select>load selection>lineart channel
Fill selection with black (you may have to invert the selection if it fills the white part with black)

Now you have your lines on a layer without any of the white background.

yep that worked!

and yes, the lineart *is* noticeably blacker than my previous way of doing things...! goodo!

[Ross Hughes]

You think Sean ever tells his students to ever go look up something for themselves?

[robbdaman]

With bitmap lineart what I've been doing lately is using Ctrl-Alt-~ to select all white and then Delete to remove it. Easily leaves me with only black lines with the rest a transparent layer where the white was. Seems this works fine if that is what you are after or am I missing something? With anything Anti-aliased it doesn't work of course.

[Zombie Dave McCaig]

Like you said, that does not work with aliased art. better to just have one technique that works for everything and stick with it. Avoids mistakes.

[robbdaman]

I suppose if you run it as an action it's just as quick and easy to do it the channel, layer, fill way. I figure it's useful to know a variety of ways anyway.

[JHFerry]

Wow guys, last I looked at my post there were no replies, Thanks for all the help!

I just got into Manga Studio, I have a ton of work to do learning coloring in PS as well but I have been lurking for years. I do have some of Haberline's CDs but he sets his lineart up much different.

[robbdaman]

Haberlin is one of those that does things with multiply colored over the lineart or just setting his lineart to multiply over the colors and sometimes he converts the lineart to bitmap to eliminate anti-aliased stuff. That works for practice and for teaching and I'm sure he sets things in a different way for whatever the job is, for his tutorials though it's teaching you the concepts of coloring. Really you can set things up however works for you most of the time but the pros here have worked through this to really figure out a great way for production and printing. Dave and Mark (and I'm sure a few others) can really get technical if you want to know those things I'm sure.

[Zombie Dave McCaig]

Setting your lines to multiply does the same thing as darken with 100% K, it doesn't matter. More important is the lines being loaded as "just" the lines, with no white.

Maybe I should make a new tutorial thing, and cover CMYK, RGB, and coloring grey tones...

[JHFerry]

^

That would be awesome for somewhat noobs like me. I am fairly decent with PS understanding but step by step instruction while explaining what the technical reason for individual approach is what a lot of tutorials lack imo. In other words, I can copy the way you do it but I really dont understand why which is why I posted the question in the first place I guess.

[JHFerry]

Blue channel will not always be 100% opaque using that method, depending on your color profile. It's a terrible habit that you should think about changing.

If I knew how I would - so what's another way of making the lineart separate on a transparent layer of its own? Your demo in the link above just says to do it but not how

Put your line art into a channel (select all, copy, create new channel, paste)
create new LAYER
select>load selection>lineart channel
Fill selection with black (you may have to invert the selection if it fills the white part with black)

Now you have your lines on a layer without any of the white background.

Ok, Dave, thanks for the link. Looks like a pretty logical setup, though I'm not sure on one thing- What's the holds layer for? The only purpose that occoured to me was to use it as a selection tool- i.e. when painting on your colors layer, you comand click (or whatever it is on a Mac) the holds layer to keep things tidy on the colors layer. Is that right?

Also, MBirkhofer gave me a great improv scanned lineart setup tut.

Scan in at 300-600dpi greyscale. The specific depends on the res you need. If it isn't being printed, save some disk space, and go 300.

Adjust the image with threshold, curves, or brightness/contrast. These will all basically let you adjust the white/grey/blacks of the image. You want to get it to a level where, the lineart looks correct, and not fuzzy with much grey outlines.

Convert to color mode, bitmap (a.k.a. Black and white.) Select 50% threshold. This will covert every pixel to either pure black or pure white.
Your lineart will look jagged at 100% zoom. This is normal. Dot gain in print, and zooming out on the web will make this invisible. The higher the rez, the less jagged the lines will appear.

Now create a duplicate layer of the image. Switch to channels menu. Select, load channel as a selection. Hit delete, which will delete all the white off of the top layer. Deselect. And lock the transparency of the top layer. Your lineart is now on it's own layer and locked.

Multiply does not work for print. As it allows the undercolor to show through completely. The black multiplied over a white, is not the same as a black multiplied over a blue. Well, in CYMK anyway. It does in RGB. Again not in print, but it's fine for the web.

Someone else will have to give the channel method, as I don't use it.

You may want to try mine out...

Instead of creating a duplicate layer of the lineart as he does... copy and paste the lineart from the background into a new alpha channel. This way at the very least you have a quick backup of the lines.

Then load that infomation from the alpha channel as a selection. You may have to "inverse" to get the selection to represent the lines, but not always.

Now create a new layer and fill with 100%K. This is the part I was mostly concerned about regarding MBirkhofer's method, as the new layer he suggests fills with a black that contains levels of CMY which would produce ghosting if printed off register. He may have just missed a step tho...

and as MB suggests, set the lines to Darken, not multiply.

Hey Guys, I did try this. I also used Dave's instructions from the other thread.

1) To make it simple, I used some line art from the net. I import it. Now I have a background layer with lines and a gray channel. When I converted from Grey to bitmap as instructed, all my layer and channel settings were greyed out so I continued in grey mode.
2) I create a new Alpha Channel (Its black by default)
3) I go to select all (now the lines are selected)
4) I paste them into the Alpha channel which now goes from Black to lines.
5) I now have 1 Layer (background) and 2 channels, the first is the original gray one and the second is my new Alpha lines channel
6) This is where it gets tricky, I create a new layer
7) With the Alpha line art channel highlighted, I go to Select > Load Selection (Inverted) and hit ok (ants have the lines)
8) I go back to layers, I highlight the new layer, hit fill using 100%K and the lines are there.

Here are my questions, am I supposed to delete the Gray channel? What do I do with the background layer?
Also, Dave when you say set the lines to darken do you mean during the fill or set the New line art layer to darken instead of multiply?

So do I convert to cmyk now? Im confused on the next steps and why the bimap instructions are not working for me.

[Sweeney]

Simpler way:

Normally you get bitmap lineart. If you get greyscale, use "Threshold" under Image -> Adjustments.

In grayscale, go to Channels palette, and drag it the channel to the "Duplicate Channels" icon (To the left of the trash can icon). Double click this new channel and name it "Lineart"

Select the original Greyscale channel in channels palette to make it active. Select All. Fill entire channel with white.

Change mode to CMYK.

Create a new layer in the Layer's Palette. Rename this layer to "Lineart Layer"

On a PC, CTRL click the Lineart Channel in the Channels Palette. (Cmmd Click on Mac). This loads the lineart channel as a selection. Fill with 100K 0C 0M 0Y. Lock transparency and movement icons in the Lineart Layer. In the Layers Palette, change the Mode of the Layer to Darken or Multiply - where you have that little pop-up menu that reads "Normal"? Click, hold, and select the desired mode.

Select background layer. Flat it. Color it. You're done.

[Ross Hughes]

1) Tape blank sheet of paper over your monitor.
2) Trace lineart onto sheet of paper.
3) Delete digital lineart.
4) Color underneath physical lineart.
5) Ship monitor with lineart taped in place to publisher and e-mail the colors. *

* - While you could always ship JUST the physical lineart to the publisher and keep your monitor, they will notice that you're cutting corners and may not offer you work in the future. Always give your all!!!!

[JHFerry]

Simpler way:

Normally you get bitmap lineart. If you get greyscale, use "Threshold" under Image -> Adjustments.

In grayscale, go to Channels palette, and drag it the channel to the "Duplicate Channels" icon (To the left of the trash can icon). Double click this new channel and name it "Lineart"

Select the original Greyscale channel in channels palette to make it active. Select All. Fill entire channel with white.

Change mode to CMYK.

Create a new layer in the Layer's Palette. Rename this layer to "Lineart Layer"

On a PC, CTRL click the Lineart Channel in the Channels Palette. (Cmmd Click on Mac). This loads the lineart channel as a selection. Fill with 100K 0C 0M 0Y. Lock transparency and movement icons in the Lineart Layer. In the Layers Palette, change the Mode of the Layer to Darken or Multiply - where you have that little pop-up menu that reads "Normal"? Click, hold, and select the desired mode.

Select background layer. Flat it. Color it. You're done.

I realized why the selection seemed like a lighter black than my original lines. CMYK (100%K) is lighter than the black lines I was using. When I filled with straight black it looked the same as If I opened the original .BMP. I guess there is some tuning to do there or can I just use black, in other words why not use black over the color setting 100%k?

So using your example, I created 1 new layer, that bottom one I filled with white and the layer 1 I used your directions. (I did need to use the selection menu because the ctrl click did not invert)
Then every time I used color and your cmyk settings the lines appeared lighter than the source so I used black. Just for the sake of my understanding, what is the difference and what are the differences between these lineart setups on a technical level? I appreciate all the help here but I am sure this well help others as well and I see so many ways to do it. One way I saw was filling all the CMYK channels with white.

I mean is multiply suitable for rgb work or do the same things apply?

[JHFerry]

So I found Sweeney's tutorials on my hard drive. In the file set up one, which is pretty much what you guys are telling me here you mention making a tutorial for RGB. Does anyone have that or can explain how to set up the lines for that> Sweeney, you now work in RGB, what is you set up like?

edit: wasnt there a download section here at one time?