Cleaning drawings

[Tessa Lewin]

Hi everyone,
I need some help. I've just come back from working on an animation in Cairo - which was really interesting - and difficult at times. I've got 3 parts to my animation - and the first 2 are pretty under control - the 3rd however is not - and I'm having some trouble figuring out the pipeline - and I thought one/some of you might have some good ideas - I was working with a character animator there (traddie- hand drawn) on this part. I am doing/have done mostly the backgrounds and I have 28 beautifully drawn scenes - which I've scanned. I've been cleaning them in photoshop - using levels mostly - but I'm not happy with the results - it really doesn't do justice to the drawings, and is really time consuming. Even if I reink the frames and scan the cleaned ones - i don't like the result. I'm quite tempted to use the polygonal lasso tool to give a print style line - but a little terrified as to the time implications of this. I guess another option is to vectorise the line - but I have no experience of this - and suspect it might take as long. Does any have any bright ideas? I would really appreciate any advice at all.
many thanks,
Tessa.

[Lloyd Raworth]

Hi Tessa,

Working in Cairo must be fascinating.

Re. your backgrounds problem, one possibility, if you want to avoid the vectorising route, which as far as I'm aware can only be done in Illustrator (but I could easily be wrong there) might be to use the Curves command (Image/adjustments/Curves) which offers a wider range of tonal/colour adjustments than the Levels command, or at least a different way of accessing them. It's easy to play about with until you get the effect you want using a combination of the eyedropper and histogram tools. It's quite good for adjusting and beefing-up lines and contrasts. Once you're satisfied with the look you can keep the settings and record them as an action using the tools at the bottom of the Action pallette (Windows/Actions), save the Action and then process the whole lot of drawings as a batch command (File/Automate/Batch) which will then reproduce your settings on each drawing automatically which should save you some time.


Not sure if this will make much sense as it is written in haste, but happy to clarify/explain further if necessary.

Good luck!
Lloyd

[Abbie Stanton]

Hi Tessa,
Sounds like a lovely project.
Have you tried opening them in Camera Raw - you'd have to do this from Bridge - the adjustments in CR are much finer than in Photoshop itself and may give you a bit more flexibility?