This tutorial is for those of you who don't have the patience, or the will to create the lineart for your pictures on the computer, but who would rather use your hand-drawn lineart for the CG. This tutorial is using both Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro examples.

Using a pencil sketch, or pre-inked image as lineart -

Once you have scanned your image it's important to clean it up some. This is especially important if the image is a pencil sketch since they are generally messier then an inked drawing. As a side note - I scan my lineart images as grayscale - not lineart or color. I never use lineart, however some people prefer that. Color is alright as well, but I find that with this method grayscale is best.

For the innitial clean up I use a feature that both Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro have - in Photoshop it's called "Levels" in PSP, it's called "Highlight/Midtone/Shadow".

In Photoshop Ctrl+L will open the Levels window - or you can find it under

In PSP Shift+M will open the Highlight/Midtone/Shadow window or open it from

It works pretty much the same in both programs. There are three adjustable sliders. The slider to the far left adjusts the darker shades / colors. The center slider adjusts the grays and midtones, and the slider to the far right adjusts the lightness. If you pull the far-left slider in more, the darker shades become darker (making gray pencil strokes darker/blacker). Pull the far-right slider in to get rid of light gray smudges from the white paper.

It takes practice to get used to exactly how much to adjust. If you add too much dark, the lines can become blocky and blotchy. Too much white and you loose some of your lines.

The problem is that usually not all of the lines were the same shade to begin with. Some of the pencil strokes are lighter then others. To correct this I take further measures to make sure all the lines are a similar shade of dark gray/black. To do that I create selection masks.

I'm quite possitive that there is probably a way to do this in PSP, but I haven't messed around with that program enough to have found it - so only the photoshop users can benefit from this adivce.

	In this image, I went through and used levels. I got the lights as light as I could and the darks as dark as I could without loosing parts of the image. However there were still some lines that were too light, and some areas that had too much gray fuzz around the lines. In the area in the circle, for example, a large group of the lines were a lot lighter then those around them.
	I wanted to adjust the levels of just those lines, but some of the lines inside the selection I made were already dark enough. Added to that, some of the lines gradually changed from the dark shade I wanted to a lighter shade that I didn't feel would be dark enough to see if colored. A selection with the polygonal selection tool, or the freehand selection tool is precise. The edge of the selection is where it stops. I wanted a 'gradiated' selection. Where the area that is selected actually fades out. (does that make any sense?)
	With a gradual selection, using the levels option again will effect the areas selected completely and will gradually effect those areas at the border of the selections. The easiest way to get specific, yet gradual or 'feathered' selections is to change to Quick Mask Mode. Below the color selectors are two buttons (highlighted to the left) The one on the right will change you into quick mask mode.
	I'ts important to have something selected before you go into Quick Mask mode, or else it won't really do anything. The areas that become the pink-ish shade are the areas that are not selected. The white areas are what is selected. To add to the selection use the eraser tool. To add to the mask, use the paintbrush tool. In the areas where I felt the lines were already dark enough I 'painted' over the lines to "mask" over them. A few of the lines that I felt were still a little light that I hadn't included in the innitial selection, I used the eraser tool on (it's important to have the eraser tool set as a 'paintbrush' in the options window so that you can use the normal brushes to choose it's shape.) The use of the brushes is what gives it the feathered effect. The brush's edges arn't sharp and precise. They fad out at the edges.
	Once I was happy with the selection I switched out of Quick Mask Mode (click on the mask button to the left under the color pickers). Now the selection you made looks like a normal selection, with the dotted lines around everything. Open the Levels window and adjust the selected area like you did the entire image earlier. Since I felt the lines here were too light, I pulled the far-left slider in more to darken the area. If the area you selected had too much darkness or too many fuzzy grays then you'd pull the far-right slider in more instead.