Photoshop Tricks (Part 2)
Thursday, February 14th, 2008The quickest way I’ve found to color my comics in Photoshop is to use the Paint Bucket Tool. What this tool does is fill in an enclosed area (such as a circle) with color. There’s a big problem with that, though. In the pixel world, curved lines are drawn with blurred gray edges to make a curve look smooth. The Paint Bucket Tool can fill in the area between the curved lines but it can’t account for the little gray pixels around the edge of the line so you get a light line in between your outline and your color. Because of this problem, I’d always thought this tool was pretty useless, but I changed my mind when I figured out how to use it in conjunction with a Photoshop filter called: Minimum which makes it work pretty darn good, and pretty darn quick. Here’s how I do it.
To start off, I’ve set up a Photoshop file with four layers. You can see the top layer named: Outlines, contains my black and white artwork. You may notice that the blending mode is set to: Multiply like I talked about in my last post. Below that is an empty layer titled: Bird, which I am going to use to color the bird’s body blue, and below that another layer titled: Hat, which I’ll use to color the bird’s hat brown.
The Paint Bucket Tool is located in the Tools palette (shown here next to the left arrow). Here’s a little trick (and it’s important), make sure you select the little checkbox for All Layers (shown above the right arrow).
Using the Color palette, I’ll choose a nice blue color, then I’ll select the Bird Layer in the Layers palette, and click anywhere inside the body of the bird. Now, I’ll select the Hat Layer in the Layers palette and click anywhere inside of the hat. I’ll wind up with something that looks like this:
Pretty quick, right? And it’s looking pretty good. I’ve got the shape I want but there’s the problem with those light pixel lines between the black lines and the colors. You can notice it especially between the black lines and the brown areas of the hat.
Let’s see what I can do to fix that. First, I’m going to switch off the visibility on that Outlines Layer so we’ll be able to see things better. To do that, I’ll click on the little eyeball looking icon shown by the arrow here.
Now, I’ll go up to the top of the screen and select Filter > Other > Minimum.
That will cause this Dialogue Box to pop up.
I’m not sure where the Minimum name comes from for this filter, but what it seems to do is by increasing the number in the box called: Radius, it increases the size around the edges of your pixels. In the case of what I’ve got showing above, I’m adding two pixels of blue around all the edges of this layer. For me, two pixels works fine, but you’ll have to experiment with the size on your own artwork as it will vary depending on the size or resolution of your Photoshop file.
Here’s an example showing my Bird Layer before and after applying the Minimum filter. You’ll notice how it puffed out the blue areas and almost filled in some of the gaps along the beak. Keep in mind that my black and white linework will be sitting on top of this layer in the Photoshop file, so we don’t need to add a lot here, just enough to fill in those light pixel lines.
Now, here’s an example showing those layers, with the Outlines layer visible, both before and after applying the Minimum filter. It makes a world of difference, right?
From here, I will select my Bird layer in the Layers palette and click on the Lock Transparency button (shown next to the arrow).
This will lock that layer to just the pixels shown, which means you will be able to go back in and change the color of that layer with a Brush, or Selection Tool, or Gradient, but the shape of the layer won’t change. That’s what I did for my finished work in the comic to get the shaded effect on the bird.
One last thing: The Paint Bucket Tool needs to have an enclosed area for it to fill properly. If you don’t leave any gaps in your artwork, you’re not going to have any problems. I tend to leave a ton of gaps in my line work, however, so I usually have to go in with the Brush Tool in Photoshop and fill those gaps in before I can use the Paint Bucket. Fortunately, you can use most any color you like to fill in the gaps AND on any layer you like, so if you want to preserve the gaps in your finished work, you can. It’ll just take a little bit longer.
February 14th, 2008 at 7:21 am
Thanks again for another really good PS idea! I’ve been looking for a way to use the bucket like this!
I leave a LOT of gaps, so i’ll have to see if this save me time over my current method, but it’ll be fun trying it out.
Thanks again, again!
February 14th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Thanks for the latest ‘trick’. Sadly I’ve just spent an age increasing the expanding selected areas by one pixel, you way means I can colour as normal and then expand the whole lot in one go. Good to know.
I absolutely adore your comic BTW!
February 14th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
I’ve gotten pretty close by upping the tolerance of the paint bucket, but this will make sure I don’t have that slight halo around the black lines. It’s not visible when shrunk, but I still know it’s there.
February 14th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Wow, I never knew about the “Minimum” method. I always just used the selection tool, and then expanded the selection by a couple of pixels (Select > Modify > Expand) and then fill the selection (Ctrl + Del). But this seems somewhat easier and quicker, because you cause use the filter on an entire layer. Great tutorial, thanks!
February 14th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Hey that’s a pretty cool way of doing that, I never knew that minimum could be used that way. That’s certainly faster that my old method of alt-selecting with the magic wand for every color block. Another way I found out about is to have temporary fills made for you automatically, read more here: http://www.questionablecontent.net/tutorial.php
You just need two plugins from BPelt, ‘multifill’ and ‘flatten’ (they’re free, just Google “BPelt plugins”.) You have to enclose any open line work like in your method, but you can also use that step to pre-lay shadow and highlight areas to save even more time. You only have use the paint bucket to choose your final colors and shadow/highlight shades/tones.
The best part is, you can keep everything on a single “COLOR” layer to save time and computer memory usage. I haven’t used this in practice as I’ve been forcing myself to use The GIMP the last several months (long story), but the tests I’ve done seem to prove that this saves a LOT of time and I’ve been considering switching back to Photoshop for this method alone.
February 14th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Oh! I forgot to clarify that the line work fill-ins are only temporary to get the color blocks, you just leave your original lines intact on the top layer. So if you want to leave gaps on purpose, it doesn’t take any more time than it does to duplicate your line work layer (which takes maybe, what, 2 seconds? 5 seconds at the most?), which you have to do to make the fills in the first place.
February 14th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
I notice you had the anti-alias on. If you switched it off before coloring, would the line art remain free of gray pixels, with a crisp edge?
February 14th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Gosh, thanks for all the comments, everyone. Glad you’re digging this tutorial. I know I was pretty excited when I figured this one out. Let me see if I can get to all the comments.
Mark,I know what you mean about leaving gaps in your artwork. I’ve got them everywhere and I’m kind of stubborn about letting the tools (Photoshop) dictate how I draw so I’m resigned to going in a cleaning my work up before using the Paint Bucket. It’s pretty quick, though. Maybe I’ll talk about that next time.
Paul, Greg, I share your pain. I used to do this using the Magic Wand Tool and expanding it. It took forever.:(
Kmykris, that’s a great suggestion. I tried upping the tolerance and it works nicely, and will actually expand your color area pretty well by clicking a couple extra times. I’ll usually fill in the gaps in my artwork with whatever color I’m filling that area, though, in so using the tolerance for me may cause problems.
Danny, that’s an interesting tutorial. I read through it real quick, but will have to go back and read through it again more carefully. It could be really sweet though.
Mark,switching anti-alias off with the Paint Bucket tool actually makes things worse because it’s the color layer that’ll have the jagged edges. On the other hand, if you scan in your linework as straight black and white (no grays), you shouldn’t have this problem at all. The downside is that non-anti-aliased (is that a double negative?) lines will look jagged and not so hot.
Thanks again, everyone.
February 16th, 2008 at 10:30 am
I don’t understand why you would bother to use the Minimum filter? What I do is choose the Paint Bucket tool, choose the Paint Bucket MODE to multiply (not the layer-multiply, the Bucket-multiply) and just fill the area. It doesn’t look jagged at all, it looks industry smooth. Am I wrong? Is your method even smoother? If you want to be extra safe, just use a higher tolerance.
PS: the “All Layers” checkbox thingy is exactly what I was desperately trying to figure out. I had no idea how to paste the color into a different layer. Thanks a lot for that!
February 16th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Oh, I forgot to mention that I keep the black and white Outlines layer on “Normal” mode, and multiply the color instead.
February 17th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Hey Boyboy. That’s the cool thing about Photoshop is there are a million different methods for accomplishing the same effects, and I’m sure everyone has their preferences. The way you’re describing sounds like it would work fine. (And glad to hear that the “All Layers” checkbox helped out).
For me, I prefer to stick with the black and white Outlines set to Multiply. Using the Multiply mode on color layers isn’t something I feel like I have a lot of control over. What that Multiply mode is going to do is actually multiply your color value with what’s underneath it. I’m not sure what the number system is that they use, but essentially white multiplies no value (zero) to the layer underneath, so that’s why it appears to drop out when placed over another color. Black multiplies the maximum value so no matter what you put under it, it’ll always remain black. Every other color though, is going to darken whenever another layer is underneath it, so if you work with a lot of layers (which I do), it’ll cause a lot of problems.
March 10th, 2008 at 6:58 am
Thanks soooo much !! You are very good at making this easy to follow … you have a talent. I have been on
so many websites to try and find easy and quick ways to color in and they are so lengthy and complicated.
(they were difficult to follow) with your way of explaining along with the diagrams it was fantastic and a breath a fresh of air and I did not need to make an action to remember, this sunk in cause you made it easy and interesting and so my brain absorbed the info. THANKS !!!!!!! I have such tight deadlines but have not illustrated in photoshop before, used to do everything by hand so I have to learn real quick. Lee-Ann
March 10th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Hey Lee-Ann. Thanks for the note. That’s way cool that you were able to understand that stuff easily. It is hard in a tutorial to keep things simple and trust people to figure out what you’re saying.
You’re totally right that there are a lot of tutorials that get lengthy and complicated and, I think, practically useless. Unfortunately, there are also lot of books on Photoshop (and Illustrator) like that as well. If you’re looking for books or anything, there is an author named Deke McClelland who writes about all the Adobe stuff, who I’d recommend before any others. It’s pretty in-depth so it can overwhelm, but he keeps things fairly straightforward and simple.