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Question

Smoothing out scanned drawn lines in Photoshop.

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
December 7, 2021
8 replies
13216 views

Hello everyone! I use Photoshop to color my illustrations. A problem I have with this is that whenever I scan my drawing, the pen lines show up as not as smooth as I'd like them to be. So I usually have to go over the entire drawing and manually erase certain edges and re-draw. Does anyone here happen to know whether there is a quicker way of smoothing out these drawn lines in Photoshop? It could be a big help if there is an answer to this! Thanks!

I have included a closeup picture of the line to show what I mean:

Windows

B

BG.123Author

Known Participant

Is there a way Adobe can design a product that can accomplish the specific smoothed line look I'm looking for, or perhaps adjust/update a setting that is in an already established product?

Kevin Stohlmeyer

Community Expert

Hey Brett,

Honestly I would agree with @davescm with going with Image Trace. Have you tried adjusting the settings to affect the quality? With a higher resolution scan you should be able to almost exactly mimic the estethics you are looking for.

For a first shot out of the gate comparatively, I think this is pretty close to your original art.

Trying to capture the "look you want" should be acheivable with a better quality/res scan and Image Trace.

B

BG.123Author

Known Participant

Hi. Yes, I have switched the settings around quite a few times with Image Trace. It gets kind of close, just not really what I'd prefer. For now I've spent the time smoothing the outline the way I usually do. It's very time consuming but until there's a more accurate method I suppose I'll continue that way. Thanks for all the suggestions! 🙂

B

BG.123Author

Known Participant

Hello again. Sorry, but none of the possible solutions that have been mentioned here have helped yet with this issue. There doesn't seem to be any way to achieve the look of smoothing the drawn scanned lines how I'd like.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

Hello again. Sorry, but none of the possible solutions that have been mentioned here have helped yet with this issue. There doesn't seem to be any way to achieve the look of smoothing the drawn scanned lines how I'd like.

By @BG.123

I have l;ooked through this old thread and can not see it mentioned, so I'll share a trick for improving ragged line art.

The first screen shot is a 200% zoom of lines drawn with the Photoshop pencil tool, because it's an easy way to create jaggies.

This is the same line art that has been Gaussian blurred (value 1.5) and a Levels adjustment to harden the resulting antialiassing (again viewd at 200%)

And viewed at actual pixel size

This only works when the linework and background are on the same layer, because Leevels needs the greyscale antialiassed pixels to average out. It is a good idea to make the layer a Smart Object because this lets you fine tune both the Gaussian Blur and Levels adjustment, although you could use a Levels adjustment layer to achievee the same thing.

I am not sure how well this would work on a scan of something like a map, because the blur will applied to everything, and might not resolve back to crisp outlines with Levels.

If the background is something other than full white, you could use one of the sharpen filters after Gaussian blur. In fact that would probably be better as it would be easier to control the halo levels is going to produce. I suspect levels would also kill the background colour.

B

BG.123Author

Known Participant

Hi. Unfortunately, the example you're showing here is not the quality or method for the drawn scanned line I am looking for. 😞

B

BG.123Author

Known Participant

Hi again. So I did go through all the methods everyone here had informed me off.
Unfortunately, I still was not getting the look I wanted. Since there doesn't seem to be a suitable way other than manually erasing and redrawing parts of the line, I guess I will just stick with that. Time consuming for sure! Perhaps Adobe can develop a better option in a future update.

PECourtejoie

Community Expert

What about vectorizing the lines? Either in Capture, or in Illustrator?

B

BG.123Author

Known Participant

Do you have a method of best doing that? I'm more familiar in Photoshop for right now.

Kuji Fox

Known Participant

The scans I use with LaserJet do seem to come out pretty sloppy. What's the best clean up method

Chris 486

Community Expert

Can you send us some samples and detail more of what you are dealing with?

Chris 486

Community Expert

Hi BG.123!

It looks like you line work is still scanning pretty cleanly. I usually have good luck using layer styles to fill in the lines more solid.

I usually use either, “Stroke”, “Inner Glow”, or “Color Overlay”. The nice thing when using layers styles is when you edit your linework in photoshop, with will keep the style on top to keep your lines looking consistent. I use these for doing quick cleanup on scanned plans.

For Stroke – Start by setting the position to inside and blending to normal to start. Then try to scale up the size to fill in the linework appropriately.

For inner glow – Start with blend mode normal, opacity 100% and again scale the size till it fills the linework.

For Color Overlay – Start with blend mode at normal, and opacity 100%

Hopefully that helps and saves some time for you!

Chris 486

Community Expert

Additionally, you can use the other sliders and options like opacity to blend the selected layer style over the linework. I also like the feature to recolor the lines after the fact for stylistic choices too!