Digital manipulation/ Digital experiments 4. Photoshop clean up

Sometimes we just want to use Photoshop to clean a hand drawn image. The first step to do this is to scan in the image using a scanner. This is fairly straight forward, the image I’m using was sent in at a high DPI because the drawing is very small.

When the image is saved onto your computer then you can open it in Photoshop. I often start by cropping the full image to just what I want. I find this useful so I don’t get distracted. I then go into image on the top tool bar and the adjustments. There is an option called black and white. I’m going to use that for the line drawing but if there is colour in your work then there are other ways of working. Selecting the option opens a window where you can adjust the levels of colour. I’m just going to stick with the default black and white.

Now that the image is black and white I want to remove the spine and edges of the book. To do this I add a new layer behind my drawing and fill it white. By using the polygonal lasso tool on the left hand tool bar I can select and delete the parts I don’t want. On my drawing the white was a slightly different white to the background. Using the colour piker and fill can I fill the parts round the edge. If you want the image to be a perfect white then use the levels option in adjustments. I like this one as a slight of white. Final image below.