Beginner’s Borders
Surprisingly, borders are often difficult for new cleaners. Perhaps it’s because there are so many methods of doing borders out there that it’s confusing when you first get started. Let me break it down:
1. Borders must be straight. This may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised.
2. Borders must be a constant width. Simple again, right?
3. Borders must have sharp 90° corners (unless one of the lines is diagonal).
As always, different groups will have different parameters for their scanlations. For Shannaro, we had 2 px border lines on a 1200 px high raw. For M7, we have 8 px lines on a 3600 px high raw that gets resized. Regardless, the three rules stated above will apply to virtually every group.
PENCIL TOOL & PAINT BUCKET METHOD (WITH GUIDES)
To me, this is a conceptually very simple method, and the guides will assure accuracy.
1) MAKE A NEW LAYER FOR YOUR BORDERS.
2) Use guides to determine where you want your borders to be. Click on the ruler that’s at the top or left side of the page and hold the button down as you drag the cursor onto the page. You’ll see a dotted line appear, which will turn blue when you let go of the mouse button. If you don’t see a ruler, press CTRL-R (Command-R for Macs).
Place a guide for every border you’re going to draw. To move a guide, use the Move Tool and drag it exactly where you want it.
No page will ever have perfectly aligned borders, so don’t worry if you have to clip off a few pixels from the panels. Try to keep the raw borders outside the guides.
3) Choose the Pencil Tool and set the width to whatever your group’s standard is (e.g. 3 pixels wide). Make sure you’re on your Borders Layer!!!
4) Start at one corner of a panel border, hold down the Shift key, and draw a straight line along the border. Your Pencil Tool will snap to the guides, so this process should be pretty quick and painless. Do that for all the vertical and horizontal borders.
See how the raw border is on the outside of my red border line? You will lose a few pixels from the image with this method. If you are clipping too much from the panel, try rotating the page differently to straighten it out. Sometimes, correcting for one border will screw up another. Do the best you can.
*** If you have a DIAGONAL panel border, use the Line Tool set to the appropriate width and make sure there is a check in the box for anti-aliasing.
5) Once you have redrawn all of the panel borders, select the Paint Bucket Tool, and make sure “Contiguous” and “Anti-aliased” are checked on the toolbar at the top. Now dump white in the space between the borders you just drew.
Notice the area outside the borders is perfectly white with the raw border and all the dust and dirt covered.
6) If you covered over any SFX or speech bubbles, you’ll have to erase that part of the border with the Eraser Tool. Set the opacity of the border layer to 75% so you can see which areas need to be erased.
Also, if a panel goes right to the edge of a page, it does NOT get a border.
After thinking long and hard, I decided that this was the quickest method for doing borders with the least chance for messing up. Also, it should work for pretty much everyone regardless of your group’s requirements.
If your group uses a border 4 px or wider, there may be gaps left in the corners since the 4 px Pencil brush looks like a + instead of a square. Just go back and add the missing pixels with the Pencil at 3 px.
Or if you’re feeling daring, you can make a square-shaped brush just for doing borders (my Bleach border brush is 8 px by 8 px). When I have time, I’ll put up a short guide for making custom Photoshop brushes since it’s so insanely easy…
I tried this method with CS3 and I don’t quite get it’s point. You didn’t tell us how many times to use the photo bucket. If you keep using it, you soon white out your whole page. Also I tried whiting it out until just the gray border is left, but that is impossible. It comes out uneven. Is there a way once you have your rulers, and pencil work down that you can simply white out everything in one go? Also don’t you have to paint the red (in my case grey) border back to black?
Good questions! For the Paint Bucket, you only need to use it once. After you click, the area in which you clicked should then turn white. If there is another section that needs to be white, but did not turn white, it’s because it’s not connected to the section you just painted. The Paint Bucket only fills in continuous areas.
Also, make sure when you use the Pencil Tool, you have it set to black. The reason it appears red in this tutorial is so that you can easily see which lines I made and which lines are from the raw.
My guess for why the Paint Bucket may not be working for you is that you drew your border lines directly on the raw. Make sure you make a new layer that only contains the black border lines and the white fill in between.
I hope this answers your questions, and I’ll edit the tutorial to make these points more clear. Thanks!
Thanks for responding. Yeah I think I messed up on the layer side. Also I didn’t choose gray, but it kept turning back to gray. Anyway great tutorial, and thanks.
Anon back again. Just came across some info that tolerance decides how much you want to wipe out. My default (I’m pretty sure I didn’t mess with it) tolerance level was 32. The first time I had to take it up to 254 (out of 255) to get it to white out the dirt without touching my borders, though even that left some dirt. 255 wipes it all out.
…..
Okay, I just played around with it again, and now 254 wipes out everything. 225 is how far I can go now. Can you or someone tell me their tolerance rating? Thanks.
Huh, I never really looked at tolerance before… Mine is set at 29. I don’t know if that’s a default or what, but it always works for me. Also, don’t forget to make sure you have the Anti-aliased and the Contiguous boxes checked.
Anon^ is back again. I am actually Dice of Noizy Scanlations :P. Looking for a faster way to do borders (since using the rectangle tool takes too much time), I came back to this method. Anyway I found out my problem. It was the layers. I am in the habit of using Duplicate Layer (I still don’t get the importance of layers), when what I needed in this case was a new layer which I got at the bottom of the layer box. This has fixed my problem. One hit of paint bucket at 32 tolerance takes care of all the color outside of the new borders. Thanks for the tutorial. Cheers.
Glad you figured it out! Not to muddy the waters, but I have another tutorial here, which is the fastest way for me personally to do borders. It uses Guides and the Polygonal Lasso – you can find it in the Borders category on the right.
There’s a brief tutorial for using layers, too, but I guess it all depends on what you’re cleaning. I have a zillion new layers for HQ Bleach and only a handful of duplicates for Bride of the Water God. Whatever gets the job done!
Nice Learned Borders. thanks
Thanks for this awesome tutorial
It helps me much because I’m a Newbie Cleaner
Anyway,I want to ask about the diagonal line
After using Paint Bucket Tool,there is always some blank spot (didn’t got rebordered) at the corner of the diagonal panel
Is that always happen when using this method or you have some tricky way to finish it up ?
I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but whenever the paint bucket doesn’t seem to be working, my first question is “are the border lines on their own layer?” If they aren’t, then the bucket won’t fill properly. If this doesn’t help, can you post a screenshot of what you’re talking about? Thanks ^_^
I do it exactly like your tutorial.
The border lines are in their own layer.
And there aren’t any problems except the diagonal lines.
Well, how do I post my screenshoot here ?
And there is another question.
Can I post your tutorial at any other site ?
Of course I’ll write proper credits ^^
Thx
After you take a screenshot (Google it if you’re not sure how to), you can upload it to imageshack.us and post a link here. As for posting the tutorial on other sites, I’ve found it’s better for people to link back to my page since sometimes I make updates or add comments. That way you can stay updated without having to constantly check back ;)
I’ll upload the screenshot as soon as I have that problem again ^^
For posting your tutorial, I’m not simply copy+paste your post here.
But I translate it to Indonesian so my other comrades (lol) that didn’t understand English well know how this tutorial works.
(Actually I already post it,sorry)
Anyway thanks for the feedback ^o^
I can’t seem to get my pencil line to go red. Should I change the image to RGB because I can’t seem to be able to this in Gray? All the pencil lines I draw come out gray which is really quite annoying.
I only used red so that you could easily see what I was drawing. For your borders, you should use black. You can change your colors in photoshop using the little palette squares beneath the tool icons.