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:
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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!
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.
Alright, you asked for it! 😉 Attached is an example.
The faces inside the red have the unsmoothed black lines. (This is what my black pen lines look like once I scan the artwork.)
The face inside the green has the smoothed black line. (This is where I have went in with an eraser and brush tool in Photoshop to manually make the line smoother. This is the way I'd prefer to have the lines look.) 
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