Another option for illustration preparation

Oh so THERES my blog! I had wondered where it had got to. Was starting to worry but I knew it was capable of looking after itself.

I wiped my Dell Studio laptop recently. Mainly due to the usual overloaded with crud resulting in snail pace performance issues. In a double whammy of "deleteage" I had also previously re-constructed my website, forgetting to reattach the blog. So having scanned in my newly completed inked illustration of 'Old MacDonalds Farm' ready for colouring in Photoshop (also newly re-installed) I was thwarted by the disappearance of my good old friend 'White Out'! (detailed in previous blog post).

I set about finding the action immediately but for various annoying reasons it took an age to locate and when I finally found it, it refused to install. So, I'd say "to cut a long story short" but its too late for that, I found another method of removing the white from a scanned line drawn illustration-

Before you do the actions below, I always start by duplicating the layer then painting the underneath layer pure white. Its something I used to do when I used the 'White Out' action as sometimes other colours from other layers would interfere with the action resulting in poor/messy outcome. I feel a white layer underneath gives the layer above a cleaner page to work on top of.

Hold down CTRL and L to open the levels box and the change the levels to get rid of the grey tones in the scan, just leaving clear white and black.

Hold down CTRL and ALT and hit ¬ (the key just the the west of the number one on your keyboard).

Delete the newly highlighted selection.

Lock the layer in your layers panel.

Hold D and ALT and hit BACKSPACE.

TADA! Job done. Spangly isn't it.