Friday, April 01, 2011

HELP: Coloring Dry Brush in Pho-Sho??

With the depressing news from Sony, I feel a little silly bumping that post from the top of our TAG roll. But I do so in the service of art--I need help!

Does anyone have any advice for coloring my Cork tribute page? I am used to doing a primitive sort of coloring in Pho-Sho (Photoshop, 'natch): I push the levels to make my image more Manichean (grays migrate to either black or white--or "black or shite" as I just Freudian-ly typed!!); I make a layer that is just black line, and emptiness (transparency) for the white; under this I add a layer where I make my color shapes. Black lines on top of color blocks, just like inking a cel. Simple, right?

But the extensive "dry brush" in this Cork piece don't want to migrate. A LOT of the edges are mid-tone and don't easily migrate to either black or white (see example--if I push levels too much one way or other, edges become irregular--too much push toward black and I get blotchy inks like on the stove pipe; too much toward mid-tone/white and I get speckled remainder lie on the front of oven furnace [the white speckles in the ink]).

I'm getting funkiness like this (color is chunky right now):
Is there a way to progressively replace color through these edge areas--so that it would really look like my brush pen has been drawn over the color? Transparency doesn't seem to work, and besides, it would require a lot of fudging to get the right values....

Any ideas that can help a brother?

7 comments:

MrGoodson2 said...

Take your bw art.
Go to channels. (you're already rgb I assume).
Duplicate the blue channel and invert it.
Drag that inverted channel onto the dotted line circle at the bottom of channels. This has made a selection of all that approaches blackness.

Go back to layers.
On a nice clear alpha channel, with that selection, do a fill with black.
That should have just clean black with a lot less aliasing.
And for surgical clean up, make that same use of the selection channel, go back and just use selected where you might need a little erase here or there.

"Mac(ctrl) - h" to hide the crawling ants.

MrGoodson2 said...

But easiest would be to multiply the back layer down to the color. Any alias approaching white will be ignored.

Davis Chino said...

Uh...what??

Ellis, I'll need to really dissect your undoubtedly excellent advice.

The blue channel?? Izzat, like, the Playboy channel?

I have yet to use channels...or alpha layers. I guess I'm a PhoSho neanderthal....

I will learn this. Immediately. MANY THANKS, BROTHER!!

MrGoodson2 said...

I'll do screen grabs and show you

MrGoodson2 said...

Here's Tom Richmond, artist for Mad, doing a btter job of explaing the process.
Mad Artist Line Art Technique

Davis Chino said...

Ellis, you're a genius!!

I think I got it. I really had to use my brain though....

THANK YOU MUCHO! Your reward is being immortalized as a comic character!

Davis Chino said...

That totally works!!

Yay, Ellis!