Smoothing out rough lines? (Details in post)

[Guest]

Hi all. Thanks in advance as I spill the details.

I hand draw my art. After scanning it, I use the Live Trace option in Illustrator with a blur setting of 2 normally, then pull it up in Photoshop to retouch the lines.

My quandary is: How do I smooth out the lines in my drawings? What I've done with SOME success is pull the PSD file back in to Illustrator, do some blur again, then back to PS.

Additionally, I've attached a sample of a scanned drawing. If you guys/gals have a better & simpler way of smoothing out the lines, I'm all ears.

THANKS!

[Noel Carboni]

What you're doing is about the best way.  I have heard there are some auto-trace functions in some of the Illustrator tools, but I don't know about them.  I just work with Photoshop.

If you're looking to smooth the lines in the rasterized scan, here's one possibility for cleaning up a line drawing, though it requires some care and success can be limited:

1.  Filter - Blur - Gaussian Blur (or Lens Blur), several pixels.

2.  Image - Adjust Curves and make the curve S-shaped to blacken blacks and whiten whites.

3.  Optionally darken areas that have been made too thin/light with e.g., the Burn Tool, and lighten too-dark blobs with the Dodge Tool.

4.  Repeat the above 3 steps several times to increase smoothness.

What you get is kind of a "photocopy of a photocopy" effect.

-Noel

[Guest]

Noel, thank you so much for the tips!

[arc_fixer · Accepted solution]

Howdy.

Nice technique, Noel.

Chewingcow: I'm not sure what you plan to do with your image. If all you need is a a line rendering without much editability, Noel's technique looks great. But if you want maximum editability, skip Ps and learn to do it all in Illustrator. If you check out the Adobe Illustrator forums, the limitations of Auto Trace are a frequent topic. If the results you are getting need a trip to Ps to get cleaned up, you might reconsider using Auto Trace. The big dogs in Illy world always recommend avoiding Auto Trace and instead recommend tracing by hand, using the pen tool. The more you do it, the faster you get. Of course, Illy has simple tools to create the geometric parts.

I don't know how much you know about Illy, but in the time it takes to run back and forth from Illy to Ps, you could probably recreate the whole thing from scratch in Ilustrator. And have a fully editable, hugely scalable vector image.

I did the tracing below using the pen tool, except for the circle, which I made with the Oval Tool. It only took a few minutes.

I kept going, and 20 minutes later, the drawing is vectorized. Twenty minutes isn't a long time when your talking about art. Especially when you consider where this 20 minutes gets you. From here on, the rest is gravy.

The above has a stroke applied to the paths. But if you want it to look more hand drawn, you can apply a brush instead of a stroke. There are tons of brushes in Illy, and it's easy to make your own. You can apply a brush that makes the lines look smoother or rougher. With one mouse click, the image above looks like the image below. It looks rougher than the original. You can make it look like it was drawn with a crayon or a calligraphy pen if you want.

   

Or you can apply color. Just a few more mouse clicks. One of bazillions of possiblilities.

It's well worth your time to vectorize your art in Illustrator. It allows you to output the same piece of artwork as anything from a business card to a T-shirt to a car wrap to a billboard. Ps, not so much. There's a reason Illustrator is called Illustrator and Photoshop is called Photoshop.

But, if you really want to use Ps (this is the Ps forum, after all), I used to scan hand drawn stuff into Ps all the time. But I seldom scanned in complete compositions like your example. I scanned in bits and pieces and assembled them with other art created in Ps. My process was pretty straight forward.

I used the Quick Selection Tool to select Africa.

Then, using the Paths pallet, I converted the selection to a vector using the Make Work Path command with the Tolerance set to 1.5. I usually set it between .8 and 2, dependent on image resolution and contrast. Fill and stroke were applied. The shape is not quite perfect (Low resolution image, fuzzy drawing make the Quick Select Tool less accurate. The sharper your drawing, the better it works.), but it can be edited using the vector tools in Ps. I would add Madagascar to the Africa layer, and organize the other shapes into appropriate laters. Building the image this way, you get maximum editability. Not as good as Illustrator, but I did it this way for years before I got Illy.

For what it's worth.

Peace,

Lee

[Guest]

Hi Lee,

Holy mackerel! That was awesome, and way over my head. I actually forgot to mention I design shirts. Time to stop avoiding Illy and the vectors. Looking forward to doing your tutorial in the next day or 2, and then check out the Illy forums. THANK YOU!

[arc_fixer]

Howdy.

Vectorphobia is a curable disease. But you have to cure yourself. The best cure is to grab vectors by the throat and not let go until until you're in charge.

I'm a long time Ps user, but have only begun to learn Illustrator in the last year. The Illy interface can be daunting, even to a Ps pro. Similar to Ps but a little klunkier, with pagan symols everywhere. But the underlying principal is very simple. You draw a line, which is called a path, and do stuff to it. You can make lots of lines in lots of shapes and do different stuff to each of them. That's it.

Semaphoric rightly points out that the initial tracing I did in Illy could have just as easily been done in Ps with the Pen tool. The basic vector tools work pretty much the same in both. Both are based on a chunk of math called Bezier Curves, which is the core of almost all vector graphics programs. Check out Bezier Curves on Wikipedia for a really helpful look at what's going on behind the curtain.

And Semaphoric is also spot on to note that what Ps and Illy do with the same vector paths is quite different. The way Ps handles paths can be disconcerting. And if you're not already familiar with paths, this can lead to vectorphobia. Doing paths in Illy is pretty intuitive, once you get over the shock of being in a world with no pixels. The vector world is actually pretty simple. The issue with vectors in Ps is that they are shackled to the pixel world. This complicates things. But the vector tools in Ps are very powerful. And if you are a Ps user, you are short changing yourself if you don't master them.

Noel: It's obvious you love to solve problems, and Illy would give you a new world of problems to solve. You'd be a natural.

Just say "No" to vectorphobia.

Peace,

Lee

[Noel Carboni]

Impressive work, Lee!  Thank you for adding your expertise here.  I might just have to pick up a copy of Illustrator...

-Noel

[Semaphoric]

You culd also just use the Pen tool in Photoshop, and then stroke the paths. Illustrator has the advantage that the stroke is updated if the path is edited, whereas with Photoshop, you have to erase your existing stroke, and then stroke again with the edited path.

[Semaphoric]

One feature of Illy I sure wish Photoshop had (anongst several . . . ), is the "Transform Each" command.

And, when you see what some people can do with a Gradient Mesh, you wonder, "Who needs pixels?"

[arc_fixer]

Howdy.

You don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but it can't hurt to look under the hood and see what's going on.

Below is a graphic showing the mathematical nuts and bolts of a simple Bezier Curve and how it all relates to Ps and Illy paths.

The Pen Tool creates the path like this:

Click down positions the first anchor point and sets the value of P0.

Drag and release positions the handle and sets the value of P1.

Click down again positions the other anchor and sets the value of P3.

Drag and release positions the handle and sets the value of P2.

Then Ps or Illy calculates B(t) and renders the path. Complex paths are accumulations of simple paths like the one above. The P0 of one path segment will be the P3 of the adjacent path segment.

When you modify this path by using the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow) to drag handle P1, B(t) is recalculated using the new value and the path is rendered. Same thing happens when you move an anchor point.

When you modify the path by dragging the path itself with the white arrow, you are changing the value of B(t). The new value is used to recalculate P1 and P2, the handles, and they move to their new positions.

And that's the mathematical basis of vector graphics in a nutshell.

Don't get me started on meshes.

Peace,

Lee