Photoshop for beginners (the very very very basics)

This tutorial is pretty much extracted from an email I wrote to a friend of mine, but I thought it might be a useful for any reader who is new to Photoshop. It contains the very basics of what you need to do to get started in Photoshop, and to prepare your work for coloring. Keep in mind that there are many different ways to go about working in PS, and what I’ve written below is only one way of doing it. You’ll quickly develop your own methods as you get familiar with PS. For this tutorial, I’ll assume the reader knows how to scan and open their image in PS. I’ll also assume that the reader has tinkered with PS at least a tiny bit to understand how to move around the interface and select tools and such.
Ok, on with the show.

Here’s a typical situation: you’ve scanned in a drawing and want to color it in PS, so you use the paint bucket tool directly on your image because that seems the fastest way to fill in areas with color. I think most people try this when they start using PS, and they find out it’s not as straight forward as it may seem. You’ll notice that when you use the paint bucket directly on the drawing, the color does not go flush to the line edges. You’ll get lines that have unwanted white spaces, halos around black lines, and weird, difficult-to-control scummy-looking effects. Check out the results in the hand and hammer image below.

This happens because the paint bucket fills in whatever color you click on. In the above example white areas were filled with three different colors. The paint bucket won’t replace all the nuances of gray and other colors that appear near the edges of the black ink lines or stray pencil lines. You may not be able to see see these nuances unless you are zoomed in several hundred percent. You can make adjustments to your paint bucket settings to control these side-effects, but this still won’t be the best way to color since you don’t have complete control of the results. (Of course, you might want these kinds of effects to appear in your drawing, but there are better ways of producing them, which won’t be covered in this tutorial.)

OK, we’ll move on to the steps that’ll make coloring more predictable and easier for you to control.

Quick note: If you make one mistake, press Ctrl+Z. if you make two or more mistakes, press Ctrl+Alt+Z to undo step by step. Press Ctrl+Shift+Z to redo by steps. If you’re using a Mac, substitute Ctrl with Cmd.

Quicker note: If you are adjusting the image in any way, always check it at 100% scale to make sure it looks alright. Press Ctrl++(plus key) to zoom in, Ctrl+-(minus key) to zoom out.

Preparation
Before you start anything, it’s best to separate your original scanned layer from any work that you do to the image.

1. Copy your original scan onto a new layer. You do this by going to the Layers window, then drag your layer with the scanned image (PS will have named it Background) to the “create layer” button on the bottom, right next to the trash button. Alternate ways is to either go through the menus under Layer>Duplicate Layer, or to press Ctrl+J when the layer you want is highlighted. Rename this layer “Lines”, “Image” or whatever you wish to label it, by double-clicking the current name of the layer.

Now that you have a duplicate layer, you can keep the original untouched, and work on the duplicate from now on. This is for precaution, just in case you do something mistakenly drastic to your working layer and want to rework from the original drawing.

2. Go to Image>Adjustments>Desaturate to dispose of all colors in the “Lines” layer, since you only want the lines to be pure black and white.

3. To get rid of pencil lines, dust, lint, cat hair, etc., use the Levels tool, under Image>Adjustments>Levels, or press Ctrl+L. Make sure the Preview box is checked.

In the Input levels frame you can see the color levels spiking up and down. Drag the white triangle at the bottom of that frame a little bit to the left. You’ll see that anything light on your drawing moves closer to being completely white. Moving the black slider makes anything dark move towards complete black. The gray slider adjusts the midtones. If you fiddle around with these, you should be able to clear out the lighter pencil lines and any dust or lint easily. For more persistent residue, you’ll have to manually go in and clean it up, since manipulating the levels too much might end up looking xerox-like.

You can use the eraser or brush with white to clean the image up. A more advanced way to go about it is to use the clone stamp tool, press S to get to it. Use the clone stamp to replace any dirty areas of your image with a clean area. Holding down Alt/Option will show a crosshair, which you’ll use to target a clean area of your image, somewhere where there’s a lot of white space. Let go of Alt/Option and you can now brush in areas where there’s residue, replacing it with the white space you targeted before. It’s always good to do a clean erasing job and to dust off lint and junk from the scanner and drawing before scanning your image, so you won’t have to do so much remedial touch-ups.

Coloring Setup
There are several ways to set your image up for coloring. I’ll show you one of the quick ways to set it. When you try it this way, it’ll be easier for you to grasp the many other methods of doing it.

1. Create a new layer and move it under the Lines layer so that it sits between Lines and Background layers. Do this by clicking the “create layer” button you used before. Fill the layer with white by either using the paint bucket tool on that layer, or press Shift-Backspace. Rename the layer “white”, “bg” or your own label. I usually just name it “x”. This white layer will act as flat background for your image. Set the Lines layer blending from Normal to Multiply. Multiply will make any white areas of the layer transparent-like, and any other colors in the layer, including black, will effect the layers beneath it.

2. Create another layer called “colors”, and place it right beneath the Lines layer. Here’s what we have so far:

You can use the “colors” layer for all coloring work for the image, or you can make more layers and use them to separate sections of the image.

Coloring Finally!
Now that you set up the layers, go into the color layers and use the brush to manually color in areas, without needing to worry about coloring on top of and destroying the lines.

Or, if you want to color in a large area, use the Lasso tool (press L). There are 3 types of Lasso tools, you can either go to your toolbox and click and hold the lasso button to get to the other types, or you can press Shift+L to toggle through them. The lasso tool is a freehand selection tool, the polygonal lasso is a point by point selection tool, the magnetic is funky, but difficult to control. Try it out.

I use the polygonal lasso most times. Here’s a quick run through of how to use it for the hammer image: click on one corner of the hammer, plot points along the contours of the hammer that you want colored in until the selection came all the way around, then close the selection. You can close the lasso selection by clicking on the first point that you started with, or by double-clicking on your last plot. Make sure you don’t click too fast while plotting your points, or else you might accidently double-click and close your selection prematurely. If this happens, you’ll have to start over, or work with the selection you made by adding to it (by holding shift and plotting another selection), or subtracting from it (by holding alt/option and plotting another selection).

When you have neatly made your selection, make sure that you’re currently on the Colors layer, then fill in the selection with the paint bucket. You now have a clean color fill, with no white streaks and no weird scummy-ness.

OK, so that’s the very basics of it all. Perhaps the most important thing I’ve stressed here is the way you handle your workflow- by preparing your workflow well, you’ll be more efficient at handling PS and applying colors and any other effects that you may fancy. There are many more tricks to learn… but that’s for another day…

You can view the full image used for this tutorial here.