How to Color Digital Line Art

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How to Color Digital Line Art

What you'll need:

Adobe Photoshop v3.0 or greater, or any graphics application that supports layer blending modes

You've just scanned some line art or imported a vector drawing, but you need to color it. So what do you do?

There are a number of obvious ways to do this, though they are often tedious or imperfect. There is, however, a fast and easy way!

Black-and-White Images

[Put your line art on its own layer...] (4k)

Make sure your line art is on a non-background layer. (To convert a background layer to a non-background one, double-click on it in the Layers palette.)

With this layer active, from the drop-down box in the Layers palette, select the Multiply blending mode. The Multiply mode effectively turns all white pixels in the layer transparent. Black pixels remain opaque, and gray pixels are blended with underlying ones.

Create a new layer beneath your line art, and color away with the tool of your choice!

Color Images

Download and install the free Eliminate White filter. It comes with instructions, which explain how to use it better than I can. =)