Urge to quit....rising.....

[dolari]

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Okay, photoshop gurus, I need your help.

I'm trying to do my comics in Photoshop, because to get anywhere in graphics professionally you have to use it. Coming from 10 years of Paint Shop Pro, the switchover has been anything but easy. The main problem, specifically with doing my comics, comes from the way I color.

The thing here is, it needs to be fast. I'm an incredibly slow drafter, so where I lost time in drawing, I gain in coloring and assembling the comic. I've managed to get my PSP routine down where I can color an entire comic in a matter of minutes:



I want to fill the hair blue, so I select a large area quickly.



If you look at the top of the hair where I've selected, there are numerous breaks, with the biggest being back by her cowlick. I "cut" these out of the selection.



Now, once that's all done, I fill the hair in, and whala, instant...blue hair.



However, following these exact same instructions in PShop give this mess:



This has been THE thing that has killed PShop and GIMP for me when it comes to the comic. The only appearant solution was to completely retrace every section needing to be filled, and that added hours to the comics, and I don't have those hours to spend.

Now that I'm trying to get more art oriented in my career, I need to learn PShop, and the best way for me to learn is by doing the comics in it. The problem is, 95% of my computer work is coloring in this method. So I need to find a better way of doing it. The fastest I've found so far is to:




The I use the color range tool to deselect all black lines.



Then go into Quick Mask mode:



Then fill in the offending bits from here.



Then I go back to regular mode and fill it in.



This is long and complicated for somthing that HAS to have an easier resolution. What do YOU, the viewer at home thing. I could really use the help, because I'm pulling my hair out on these comics that would take me all of an hour to do in PSP.

Remember, I'm looking for Quick. Not Artistic. Although if you can do both, great.

Comments

[soltice.livejournal.com]

Usually, I just use the point-to-point lasso tool to trace out the edges of the region I wish to color. I put each region on a different layer so that if I need to select it again, or alter the hue/saturation, I just need to select the layer with no region selection whatsoever.

This is one thing I found key to effective use of photoshop, layers. If you keep your image on one layer, you will feel your boot in your backside all too quickly. Sometimes you can cheat on the number of layers if their color regions aren't touching. In my artwork often you'll find a hair layer, a "bangs" layer, a jacket layer...etc.

By far, selecting each region is the most tiedious part of this method. I can cheat because the pencil shading in my art leads to thick lines that are easy to select. I also use a lot of transparency to let the underlying sketch through (also because of the shading).

I think what would be better for you is to put the sketch as the topmost layer, using the channel selection tool to get rid of the whitespace. Then have your color layers below it. That is, of course, if this comment has any merit at all.

[invisible-gurl.livejournal.com]

Similar to what soltice said above, my thoughts are: layers. If your goal is to learn Photoshop because you feel it's necessary for furthering your professional goals, then you need to learn to use Photoshop correctly/the way professionals do. Which means learning how to use layers. Because that's the whole big advantage of Photoshop, and if you're not going to use layers, there's no point in using the program.

If your goal is to crank out fast comics in the same style as you've been doing, stick to PSP. If you're looking to grow artistically, and produce more professional-looking work, then you need to learn how the pros color.

soltice mentioned the point-to-point lasso tool. This is something you might want to try around playing with, because it makes tracing around line art *dramatically* easier than doing it free-hand. (I can't even *imagine* making lasso selections freehand anymore...such a slow and frustrating process).

Anyways, my 2 cents.

[soltice.livejournal.com]

Futhermore, http://www.polykarbon.com/ and the Studio Cutepet CD are excellent resources for anime/comic photoshop techniques.

[wyndhover.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd use the paint bucket tool, set to a tolerance of about 35-38, with antialias and contiguous checked, then do it with one click. Probably with hair a couple of touch-up clicks will be required for tips, but in general it's a really fast way to go.

[lisalees.livejournal.com]

I use a separate layer for the colors and bucket fill, first using my tablet to paint a hard-edged line around the area in the same color. (I use gimp, so the terminology may not be right, but I think they are functionally the same.)

kinda the same advice as the others

[primalsoul.livejournal.com]

I mostly use photoshop to work for video(logos and moving animated elements) so my help may be less than helpful buy FWIW:

the key to photoshop is to work in layers and masks, that is where the true power of photoshop is , try think less illustrator lines and fills. use a new layer for each new element and be sure to name them to keep fom pulling your hair outlater on. use the point lasso tool. if you can get a tablet and stylus you would speed up the selecting process by quite a bit. work from the background forward so you can be somewhat sloppy/rough in the areas that will be covered by the foreground elements/layers.

[alias_sqbr]

Basically I agree with everyone else. Here's a few points I mainly picked up from other people's tutorials:
-you can make a greyscale image act as if it were black-at-various-levels-of-translucency by setting it to "multiply" in the "layers" pallete. Thus you can put your linework over a colour layer and have it show through. I generally just redraw the darn thing, but I own a tablet and have lots of mistakes to fix up :)
-you can make lines more opaque by creating a duplicate layer then merging the two together.
-If your lines are ok except for a few open patches you can fill them in on the colour layer using the paintbrush, then use the fill tool. You could even just trace the whole outline with the appropriatte colour and then fill, if that's quicker than your current method.
-the magnetic lasso is good too

*feels very humble commenting on the creator-of-a-comic-I-read's lj*

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

Thanks for reading. :)

Why abandon Paint Shop Pro?

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

I don't understand just why you abandoned Paint Shop Pro, since you can save and read PSD files in PSP anyway. I use PSP9 + Fireworks MX to do my web comics (http://lauraseabrook.comicgenesis.com/) (with various results).

In any case, in PSP9 it's dead easy to colour over b&w originals - just add a MULTIPLY layer on top and paint directly on it the colours you want - I sometimes use a mask to restrict the colours. In PSP9 you can dynamically alter the brush size by pressing ALT and moving the mouse up/left or right/down, which makes it very easy to colour in little nooks and crannies.

I haven't used Photoshop much. I have access to it at my university, and an old 5.5. version somewhere, but I just didn't like the interface.

[missratbat.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. What I tend to do is a bit different, I think...

I scan the inked drawing (this might be a difference, as I always have solid black lines on my inking) at 200%.

Once in Photoshop, I raise the brightness and contrast by 20 points each. This is mostly to make the white proper white and the black proper black. Maybe that's an effect of my scanner or my paper that they're not already.

Then, just to rub it in, I set the brush to black, color burn, 50% opacity, and a nice big size to run over the picture.

Then I do the 'base' colours simply by pointing the paint bucket tool into the right area with the right colour. I tend to set the tolerance to 55 or so.

To shade, I use the magic wand to select the area of colour I want to shade, then shade manually, painting the darker colour right onto the lighter one - the select means it doesn't go outside the lines.

The result, something like this:



That didn't take me much more than an hour, that strip. And that includes faffing about with new fonts. The first parts make this sound a bit more complicated than it actually is. I don't use layers for this kind of business, so this might be different again from what others have suggested.

Anyway, colouring comics by Photoshop, the Sigma method. Phew!

Scanners

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

Once in Photoshop, I raise the brightness and contrast by 20 points each. This is mostly to make the white proper white and the black proper black. Maybe that's an effect of my scanner or my paper that they're not already.

For some reason most affordable scanners seem to be like that. I found it was better to can in colour at a higher DPI, than using line-art or greyscale, and then reduce / use the above.

My two cents

[wytwolf.livejournal.com]

Here's a simple tutorial I made for my friends a few years back. maybe it'll help a bit. :3

http://www.genshomanga.net/tutorial/PStutorial.htm