When I first started using Photoshop to color my images, I wasn"t fortunate enough to have someone tell me how to scan my images. Thankfully for you, you"ve stumbled upon someone willing to help you not find out the hard way like I did. This tutorial will teach you how to clarify your line art to a point that is much more defined, and crisp-looking.

There is more to scanning an image than just pressing the scan button on your scanner. Before you scan anything, you need to assess what it"s going to be used for. For this tutorial, we"re going to assume you wanted to color an image. Since both pencil and ink are pretty standard, we"re going to cover both of them.

The image to the right is a scan of a regular pencil drawing at 300dpi, which came out to 1283x2286 pixels. That"s pretty big to be used for the web, so I"ll have to resize it dramatically. Usually, changing the dpi to a lower amount will do the job for you. 150 or 75dpi should fit much better on the screen.

An easy way I"ve found to resize your image to the way you"d like it to appear on screen is to zoom out until it appears the size you would like it to be. After this, you can press Alt + Ctrl + I, or go to IMAGE - IMAGE SIZE to resize the image. Now, in the first drop-down box, change "pixels" to "percent", and enter the percent shown on the title bar of your image. It will then resize the image to be that exact same size. Neat, eh?

To get your image back to 100% easily, press "H" on your keyboard to select the Hand Tool, and then at the top toolbar, press the button that says "ACTUAL PIXELS". It will then zoom to 100%.

After you have your image at a decent size, you"re going to want to discard all color information. Do this by pressing Shift + Ctrl + U, or by going to IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - DESATURATE. This will turn the image completely grayscale.

With your image now colorless, you can adjust the levels without fear of random unseen colors rearing their ugly heads when you increase the brightness or whatever.

Go to IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - LEVELS to bring up the window in the picture to the right. The center of this window shows a rectangle with three arrows beneath it. The black one to the left represents shadows of the picture, the middle gray one represents the midtones, and the white one represents the highlights. By dragging the black and white arrows closer to the center arrow, you"ll increase the contrast. Since there is no one "magic setting" that will make this feature work for any possible situation, you"ll have to experiment a bit to see what works best for your picture.

As you can see, the lines are now much darker than they originally were, and even somewhat resemble an inked drawing. There are still a few places that need to be touched up, like the ears and a few of the thicker areas.

Another great way to get your line art looking top-notch is to, of course, ink it first! This requires double the work it took to draw it, but the end result is much better. As you can see, compared to the darkened pencil lines of the picture above, the inked drawing to the right is much darker, and more crisp.

Inked line art doesn"t usually require much fixing by way of levels, but the one thing you can do with it that you really can"t do with pencil line art is convert it to vector art. Why is this good?

Vector Art vs. Raster Art

People are much more familiar with raster art than vector art, whether they know it or not. Raster art is made by changing the color of the pixels that make up an image, which is what you do when you color your images in Photoshop or most other art programs. In raster art, images are composed of pixels in rows and columns. Each pixel is a different color, and all of those pixels, when viewed from far away, look like an image. While there is nothing wrong with raster art, you"ll find it is not suitable for resizing. While shrinking an image down doesn"t cause too much distortion, enlarging a raster image will result in what is called "interpolation". When making the image bigger, if you"d just make all the pixels bigger, the image would look "jaggy", so the computer creates new pixels in between the original ones to help it look smoother. The result is that the bigger you resize the image, the more blurry it becomes.

Vector art is not comprised of pixels, as raster art is. Instead, vector art is created from mathematical data. This means that all the curves, colors, and text are able to be resized as big as the universe and will never lose clarity! The best use for this is to convert your line art into vector art, and then resize it to your liking and THEN color it.

For this, I will be using a program called Adobe Streamline 4.0. First, I will scan my inked art in at 300dpi so that Streamline will be able to pick up all the small details. You"ll have to save the image as a .PSD file for it to work in Streamline, so make sure to do that first.

Load up the picture in Streamline, and press Ctrl + T, or go to OPTIONS - SETTINGS. This will load up the settings dialogue. Here, you"ll want to choose the option "INKED DRAWINGS".

I"ve found this setting to be quite satisfactory, so I myself do not mess with anything further. You can, if you like, experiment with other settings to see what works best for your picture.

Anyhow, you may now convert your image into vector art by either pressing Ctrl + R, or by going to FILE - CONVERT.

Now, save your image by choosing FILE - SAVE ART AS. Either .ai or .eps formats will work just fine. After saving your image, open up Adobe Photoshop, and choose to open your vector image.

You"ll get a window like the one to the right. You may have to change a few settings, such as changing "Mode" from CMYK to RGB Color. The "Resolution" setting is entirely up to you. I would choose to keep it at 300 or at least 150. This way, when you color your image, you"ll have plenty of room to put fine details. You"ll also have a large master copy to work from, and you can resize it down, and not worry about having to enlarge it, since it will already be large to begin with.

In case you weren"t exactly sure what the big deal about vector vs. raster art is all about, I"ve put three side-by-side comparisons of pencil, ink, and vector lines together. You decide which looks best.

Pencil

Ink

Vector