Scanned image and AGS, little help?

Squinky · Sun 03/12/2006 23:24:12

I'm wanting to draw and ink my backgrounds and hopefully my characters if I do another project. Problem I have is, I'm wanting to be around 640x400 for resulotion and I figured that equaled about 3.2 inches by 2 inches. Not very big to draw a background in. Not much room to detail on the character.

I went ahead and drew it at double size and then sized it down, and it looked okay. I'm hesitant to drw at three times the size for fear of making it look jumbled up.

But are there any tricks out there, or does somebody know a better way of doing this?

Evil · Mon 04/12/2006 00:07:23

Really, any detail that will get jumbled up in the shrink, should just be added after the scan. You could always scan and color it big, then re-size after you're done. Lose a little quality, but at least it's there in the right spot.

Squinky · Mon 04/12/2006 00:46:11

Thanks man, I think you are right. I've been fooling with drawing around 9x6 and that seems to work pretty good.

Squinky · Wed 06/12/2006 05:37:36

Okay, things are going well with the backgrounds and sizes now, but I've hit a problem with scanning and the antialised edges I get on my characters.

Does anyone know a faster way to clean up those fuzzy scanned edges other than going in and doing it manually?

Thanks for any help.

Evil · Wed 06/12/2006 05:40:43

It really depends on the situation. Can we get an image? Usually, if I'm thinking about what you're talking about, you can just adjust the levels and drag the lights tward the darks.

Squinky · Wed 06/12/2006 05:54:35

Heres my test background dealy. You can see the dood has the pinks around him still, that box around him was probably me just being stupid. I just filled in photoshop around him.
http://img246.imageshack.us/my.php?image=scrnshotkp2.png

Mr Flibble · Thu 07/12/2006 16:13:42

Darken your Gamma Correction, play about with the threshold, basically adjust the brightness and contrast until you get the darkest lines to black and the lighter unwanted lines to white.

Although ultimately I have found that the process works best if you ink your pencil sketch before scanning. Any black pen with smooth flowing ink would work, a gel pen or something. I wouldn't recommend ballpoint pens for this, they skip and you need to lean too heavily.

ildu · Thu 07/12/2006 17:33:26

Just adjust the levels to get rid of gray mid-tones. If you've got PS, go to 'image->adjustments->levels'. It's extremely easy.

Squinky · Fri 08/12/2006 01:00:23

I ink my stuff with Micron pens, they seem to work well for most of my art. The un-inked background is just there for me to test sizes and see how stuff looks.

I normally scan and then Hit Ctrl-M and do that swanky curves thing to adjust it and get rid of the stray stuff, but it didn't get rid of all of them. I just tried playing with contrast and levels and the colors, but regardless, I always am left with the pink fuzz around my dood. It's weird.

MashPotato · Fri 08/12/2006 01:25:21

One thing you could try to do is to use the magic wand to select the black lines (turn the tolerance up until you are satisified with how much is being picked up), then colour everything selected the same shade of black. Delete everything else, leaving a pure black & white image. This will definitely require a little bit of cleaning up, but maybe not too much if your inking is pretty uniform... worth a shot ^_^

TheYak · Fri 08/12/2006 04:23:02

Given the above scan, if I didn't want to lose any light-stroked detail, I'd play with the levels until I got rid of the stray marks and make that one layer. I'd duplicate the layer and be a little harsher with the levels to get only blacks (or near to it) then put in darker lines by hand for the stuff I've lost from the second leveling using the first as a guide.

I've had this problem too, the two things that worked for me were penciling lightly (with a hard versus 2B or something) and re-inking w/ Microns and erasing or using a uniform highlighter or lightly colored marker for the sketching so I'd have something easy to pick out in cleanup.

I was playing with the levels before I read the other posts, so may as well post it, I guess.

Kweepa · Fri 08/12/2006 05:50:58

Take your black and white sketch and paste it on a new layer. Invert it, then paste it on the alpha channel and fill the colour channel with black. You should now have anti-aliased black lines on a transparent background. You can colour in the interior by painting in a layer under the lines.