I am an artist by nature so I tend to draw a lot. One thing I have had to learn through trial and error is how to bring my drawings into Photoshop, color them and maintain ALL the lines that were made whilst drawing it. In the past I used to scan it in, place the layer to multiply and then color on a bottom layer but that had it’s share of problems. For one I had a hard time blending one color seamlessly into another, and I could not color my lines a nice sepia brown or gray due to multiply adopting whatever color was beneath it. So I am presenting this tutorial to help any of you out there who have had this issue. This is the definitive way of bringing in line art for coloring in Adobe Photoshop.

Scan and Prepare Line Art
I like to have my images large for Photoshop so I scan my artwork in at 300dpi. Once it is scanned in, I save it and then bring it into Photoshop to resave it. I normally re-save it as a PSD file, for this example I used the name “Brin_Colored.psd”. Once the file is opened and resaved as a PSD document, look at your layers panel and double-click the Background to make it a layer. This is very important for the next step.

Select Channels and on the bottom of the tab you should see an icon that looks like a ring of dots. This is the “Load channel as a selection” button, go ahead and press it and you will see some running ants appear around your line drawing. Once you have the ants, select your Layers tab and press delete to clear the white from the art itself. Now don’t be shocked because it will look washed out and seem as if you’ve lost some of the lines. No worries, above your layer on that tab you will see a series of icons, one looks like a square with a transparency. This is to “Lock transparent pixels”, click it and select a color from your swatches that will represent your pencil. I chose black.

With your color selected, press Ctrl + a (Command + a for MAC) to select all. Select Edit, then Fill, then make sure Foreground color is selected and click OK (Or you can just do ALT + Backspace). You will see your artwork is now back in all it’s glory sans annoying white background. Lock this layer if you feel you may mistakenly color on it later on. Now create a New Layer and drag it beneath this one and fill it with White (CTRL + Backspace  if you have white as your secondary color). Now we are ready to color our art.

An Example of Coloring
I would go into the intricacies of coloring but that is it’s own tutorial, for now I can lend you an example of how I choose to do it. In the past I would lump all colors up unto their own layer that layed beneath the line art but I hae found it is easier to manage art when every color has it’s own layer (especially for revisions later on down the road). So create a new layer between the white background and your line art and select some color and an appropriate brush size. Zoom in closely and color the area that you wish applying shadows and highlights as needed. Simple enough right? Just make a layer for every color and remember to save often.