Advanced Grays (Film Grain)
This tutorial may be specific to how M7 does grays, but the principles can probably be applied elsewhere. It covers:
- Flat grays
- Gradient grays
- Patterned grays
We’ll start where the Redrawing Tutorial leaves off. You’ve covered the gray area with a new layer of gray. You’ve redrawn the line art on top.
Select the gray layer and apply the Film Grain Filter with settings 8/0/0. Filter > Artistic > Film Grain. The first slider is set to 8, the second and third are set to 0. For M7, make sure you’re working on the original 3000 px raw so that it resizes properly when you’re done.
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Sometimes, we have gradient backgrounds that go from dark gray to light gray.
For this, use the Eyedropper Tool to take a 5 x 5 sample of both ends of the gradient (one for the foreground swatch, one for the background swatch).
Next, select the Gradient Tool, which is in the same square as the Paint Bucket. The default gradient is Foreground to Background.
First, put a layer of gray over the gradient. You can either use the Lasso Tool like in the Redrawing Tutorial or you can use the Pen Tool if you prefer.
Now lock the transparency on that layer so you can only affect pixels that have already been designated a color.
With the Gradient Tool Selected, and the appropriate shades of gray as foreground and background, draw a line in the direction of your gradient.
Now apply the Film Grain filter like before. You’ll have to tweak the second two sliders a little bit to make sure the gradient isn’t fuzzed out. For this panel, I used the settings 8/2/2.
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Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of gray patterns, too. In general, they have a swirly or mottled appearance.
Using whichever method you prefer, copy the mottled gray background onto it’s own layer. Lock the transparency on that layer.
Go Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Move the slider until the original print texture is no longer visible. The reason the layer is locked is so that you don’t blur onto other parts of the page.
Now add the Film Grain. Like with the gradient, you might want to tweak the last two sliders to prevent the filter from fuzzing out the contrast. Again, I used 8/2/2 for this.
I’ve come across a few instances where the differences between the grays was very small. This can be troublesome because when you apply the film grain, you lose even more of the contrast. If this happens, make a duplicate copy of your blurred gray layer and place it above the layer that gets the film grain. Now set the duplicate to multiply and reduce the opacity until you get the shades of gray you want. But since you have the extra layer, your film grain is most likely faded now, right? In this case, set your film grain extra strong to compensate for the second layer. For one panel, I had the Film Grain set to 12/2/2 and the top multiplied layer was at 80% opacity.
In some cases, you’ll have a mottled gray background with white spots. You have to be careful because if you film grain white, it’s no longer white. For this, either 1) don’t include the white areas in the gray blur layer or 2) use the magic wand to copy and paste the white areas onto a layer above the gray blur layer.
Oh I like that. I like that a lot! I’ll run it past the boss since I know we try to keep all our grays as uniform as possible, but it’s definitely something we’ll play with in the future! Thanks for the tip!
Somehow I think I managed to delete your original comment… would you mind posting it again? Sorry :(
LoL and I was concerned I’d posted something wrong…
Ok ok, now I’ll have to do it again, though.
Anyway don’t mind, now I can specify better what I’d
Here is it again: http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/4984/picture172bu0.png
First I’d have to duplicate the image size (resize by 200 percent) – You will see why – using interpolation nearest neighbor in order to don’t mess up the image.
Then I did like this tutorial teach (copy the mottled gray background onto it’s own layer, and use the gaussian blur to vanish original texture).
So I’d increased some of contrast and applied color halftone filter (filter > pixelate > color halftone > max radius: 4, all channels: 45) If i don’t have duplicated image size, then the dots would have too big inrelation to original pattern.
And finally I’d resize the image to its initial size, and stroked the baloons borders to make it a little better.
PS: My English is poor. Sorry any error.
Thank you thank you!
hey, i was thinking, i really need some help in that how do i redraw/clean a double page? like if the page was somewhat badly scanned, not that it’s to gray but it has a black line in the middle and i’m supposed to remove that one how do i go about doing that ? you know from a bock were the pages “sink” in creating a black line. any help would be appreciated
ahh sorry posted in the wrong section.
Redrawing and connecting a spread that has bad gutter shadows? Frankly, I don’t think any spread in the world is worth the time it will take to do that. If your black line in the middle isn’t too bad, then line up your two pages in the same window as best as possible. Make a duplicate of the layer (always work on a duplicate!!) and start cloning. The First Aid brush is good, too. Line art will probably be best if done with the pen tool if you can’t clone them. Maybe I’m just really cynical these days, but I rarely spend the time to redraw spreads anymore. It’s just not worth it, IMO, unless you have a deep-seated need to make it perfect. For Bride of the Water God, which has a billion patterns and grays, I usually just draw a white column or black column down the center that covers the edges of each page: http://www.mangatoshokan.com/read/Bride-of-the-Water-God/chiresakura/74/22
There was NO WAY I was going to redraw those roofs XD
I don’t blame you for that one XP, those roofs look time consuming…….which leads me to my question, about how long does it take you to clean a single page? It looks so time consuming T.T
Hmm… that depends largely on the raw and just how good you want the final product to be. If I have a good raw, I’ll usually only spend 2-5 minutes cleaning a page depending on if it needs redraws. If you need to clean up your blacks and whites a lot, that can be another few minutes. A medium level redraw can take 5 minutes, a difficult redraw can take 10 or more. It used to take 2 hours to clean and redraw grays for HQ Bleach (which is one reason M7 died). The time involved in cleaning depends entirely on the situation, but it’s up to you to decide how much of your time it is worth ;)
Ah, that makes sense….but so little time on something that looks like it would take forever is truly awesome 8)