Click on image - BIG video will open in new window
I know a lot of you are eager to get to all of the fun color stuff, but there's a few important details that we have to cover in order to make the coloring process work smoothly.
It's time to get our finished inked drawing out of Adobe Illustrator, and into Adobe Photoshop. All of the line work is going to get colored in Photoshop, and everything else will be painted in ArtRage.
Exporting artwork from Adobe Illustrator to Photoshop is pretty quick and easy, but there are a few choices you need to make to ensure a smooth transition.
Adobe Illustrator images are infinitely scalable -- in other words, they look perfectly smooth no matter how big you blow them up.
When you convert those drawings into Photoshop, you need to decide what the resolution will be, because Photoshop is a raster-based program; it sees drawings as a collection of individual pixels (pixel = "picture element") rather than mathematical vectors.
If the resolution is too low, the drawing will look bad when it gets blown up. If the resolution is too high, the file size will become too big to work with. I find that 300 ppi (pixels per inch) is a happy medium.
If you want to keep your layers separated, make sure to export to the Photoshop format. There's also a checkbox that appears during the conversion process which will ask you if you want to preserve the layers.
Finally, one of the most important options is whether or not to use antialiasing. When a smooth vector drawing gets converted to a bitmap/raster-based program like Photoshop, you may want to have the edges smoothed out to give your line work a softer edge. Antialiasing is not a good choice when coloring cartoon and comic book style line work.
Say "no" to anti-aliasing.
Just say no.
The next two Photoshop tutorial videos will be showing all the step by step techniques I use to digitally color line art in Photoshop!
It's gonna be quick and easy, and I'll show you all my oddball shortcuts!
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If you're just joining us,
here is the COMPLETE list of all eleven
Adobe Illustrator Cartoon Inking
tutorial videos:
tutorial videos:
Here is the YouTube version if you have trouble viewing the BIG high-resolution video at the top of the page...
I don't understand why you want anti-aliased turned OFF. Doesn't that make your smooth lines have hard stair-step edges? You don't want to see that!
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you'll explain in next video.
Hi Anonymous -- it does seem counterintuitive to turn the anti-aliasing off, but here's why I do it:
ReplyDeleteAnti-aliasing works by gradually softening the edges of the line with lighter shades of the main color. If you zoom in on an anti-aliased line, you will still see all the jaggies -- it's just that they appear smoother because of the gradients. When you paint over an antialiased line it colors everything the same and the line becomes distorted and too fat.
If the resolution of the image is high enough, the appearance of jaggies is not an issue. Sometimes after I have finished an illustration I will increase the resolution in Photoshop. In the process of increasing the image size, Photoshop manages to give everything a beautifully smooth edge without any color distortion. Other imaging processing programs cannot match Photoshop for the unique way that it be blends the image pixels when you are resizing it.
This may not make sense the way I'm explaining it, but all I can say is that if you look at the final product you don't see any jaggies.
I'm sure there are many different ways of doing the same thing that work for many different artists. This is the stuff that works for me, and I hope it's a help to people like you. Thanks for asking!
Ctrl-clicking on your layer with your line work also selects the lines only.
ReplyDeleteAnother option is to lock transparent pixels in your "Layers" menu. When you paint, you paint only the lines.
Love your work!
rogierius