Photoshop: Extract for Rendering

Extracting Line Art & Drawings for Rendering

 
The method I recommend for pulling line art, drawings, and handwriting smoothly off their background surfaces. Ok, every image and scenario is going to have qualities that make using one selection tool or another work the best. For the end result here, perhaps even duplicating a Channel might do the trick, however, even for intermediate users, this whole thing about Channels can be more complicated than it’s worth. This exercise involves using a Levels Adjustment Layer and the Select Color Range menu option. 

My exercise example comes from an old clip art book of very detailed etchings. It was manually scanned without any automatic corrections or adjustments.

1 In the Adjustments Panel, add a Levels Adjustment (it’s the second icon, top row). In the Histogram (that charts the image’s shadows, midtones, and highlights), drag the shadows triangle toward the center until you see the Adjustment really darkening the darks. Do the same with the highlights triangle. See below.

If you still have some mid-grey areas, dirt, overall dinginess, move the midtones triangle toward the left as well. In general, you’re using these adjustments to improve what we tend to think of visually as the contrast overall.

2  Make sure you have targeted the original layer with the drawing in it – click once on the layer in the Layers Panel to make sure. Go to the very top menu: Select > Color Range. Now you’ll see this dialogue box (below). Move your cursor over into the actual image area – your cursor should look like an Eyedropper tool. Click on a good, solid black area and you’ll see the preview in the Color Range dialogue box change a bit.

What you see in white in this little preview will be selected when you click “OK”. That Fuzziness setting – that’s what makes Select > Color Range so magical. It’s going to increase the amount of pixels selected, what Photoshop calls “contiguous”, some partially selected (transparent), much like the Refine Edge and Feather Radius options does with other selection tools. (Much like that… but not exactly the same thing.)

3You’ve clicked “OK”, and what you will likely see is a psychotic-looking bunch of marching ants (marquee) around your fish. That was the hardest part… cake, right?

At this point you can do several different things, but I say go ahead and add a layer mask to the fish. Remember, when you have marching ants ON and you click the Layer Mask icon, everything outside those marching ants will be masked away, aka hidden.
4You may want to keep that Levels Adjustment Layer if you like what it’s doing to the layer under it. However, in this particular image example, if we bring in a new background layer, that Levels Adjustment, by default, is adjusting all layers underneath it. The visual below is a quick reminder of how to control that if you still want to maintain all your separate layers. See below:

So, target the Adjustment Layer (just click on it once in the Layers Panel). Now, go back to your Adjustments Panel and hit that 3rd icon over, a set of overlapping circles that, in Photoshop, represents clipping the adjustment to only the layer directly underneath it.

This method of extracting works really well for hand-drawn sketches and line art you want to bring into photoshop to render, paint, or integrate into compositions. In these scenarios, you need  that line art floating on a top layer, free of any original backgrounds so you’re free to render away.

©Christina Pein 2012