PhotoShop curves
This may be old news to a number of you but it is a new tool I picked up this week.
I have been working on a book targeted to children 8-10 years old that contains a number of pencil illustrations. The thought of scanning then cleaning up the ambient area of the white backgrounds was not something I was looking foreward too. I called my computer specialist for a tip and he was a life-saver.
For years I have used the "curve" feature in PhotoShop, found in the Image/Adjust menu, to lighten and darken my work. When I would try to lighten or whiten backgrounds I would just pull the line from the center point and watched what materialized from the preview. Craig taught me that I could set a 3-value range to pull from.
The examples I will share are: the actual "Curves window", one of the pencil sketches in which I have deleted a box in the background to show the white area, and the same pencil sketch corrected with the curve box marked at the 50, 25 and 9 value points. It also shows the curve line indicating the output. All of the things that I have changed will take place in red.
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