Posted: Sat Jan 07, 2006 5:01 pm Post subject: line drawings- magic wand problems
Hi,
If anyone can help me I'd be very grateful. I'm working to a very tight deadline and on an extremely steep learning curve...
I have made some line drawings in graphite pencil on white cartridge paper. I want to animate them (starting with simple stuff, just gliding, fading in and out, etc not stop frame) in AFX, presuming this is the best package for it. I want to seperate them from their original background (the paper), invert them and bring them into a new simple dark background. So that they look like chalk drawings on a dark background.
I've scanned them, inverted them in Photoshop and have been advised to first use the magic wand tool in PShop to get them out of the original background. However, although they are line drawings the line is quite sensitive, so varies in tone. I'm struggling here with the magic wand- when I use it to select and then copy and paste into a new document it looks horrible quality and I lose all the nuances of the original drawings. I've experimented with having the tolerance at various points between 0 and 30 (and with 'contigous' set to on and off- I don't know what that means!), but it never seems to select the whole drawing properly and the it always looks very aliased/pixelated when pasted into a new document. I would like them in the anmimation to still look like drawings that were done with a pencil, rather than pixelated crude interpretaions of that.
Can anyone suggest a more sensitive way of doing this? Most of my scans are TIFFS around 20 mb, but a few are jpegs, which I'm guessing isn't sensible if I want optimum image quality? The issues I'm having applies to all the files though.
Thank you for your time, in my hour of abject panic!
Well use another tool for this kind of job. When you have the possibility to solve your problem with inly one color to select color range might be a better tool.
Select/color range.. and click on the white background.. on the little image you see, you can actually see what is selected and what not. Playing with the fuzziness will get you the result you need, funziness tells you how much you allow ps to deviate from the color you set to select.
Joined: 23 Nov 2004
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Location: Swansea UK
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 4:53 am Post subject:
You can set a higher tolerence in magic wand, up to 255 (I think) you could also use select colour range (as Witam says)
As for the pixilation, theres a few possibilitys for that, one is the scan resolution (although I doubt it in this case) another is the way photoshop see's things, it's really designed for photo editing, possibly Illustrater may be better for what you want?
Contiguous means it selects adjacent pixles of similar value, uncheck it if you want to select all the areas instead of just those (enclosed) near the sample point.
It might also be worth clicking anti aliased, this hekps soften around curves etc and may help your pixilation propblem.
i agree with the illustrator being better, but if your already gonna go that far, and still have to animate it, i'd use flash. cartoonsmart has some really nice drawing and animation video tutorials, i actually have the complete courses....check it out www.cartoonsmart.com
and even if you've never used flash, this guy walks you through step by step, and keeps it pretty interesting.
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