This is a compilation of different ways to get nice pointy speedlines without going crazy.

First use the Line Tool to draw your speed lines.

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Then go to the Filter Menu > Blur > Motion Blur

Make sure the Angle matches the direction your line is going in, and tweak the distance to determine just how pointy the line is.

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Make your first anchor at the tip of the speed line. Make your second and third anchors at the base of the speed line. Close the path by clicking on the first anchor. Fill the path.

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First, set your Brush Tool to the appropriate width and then set the Minimum Diameter around 35%. You can set that higher or lower as you see fit.

Again, make the first Pen anchor on the tip of the speed line. Make a second anchor at the base of the line, and then close the path by clicking on the first anchor again. Basically, it folds the line back on itself.

Now right click, choose Stroke, and make sure the Simulate Pressure box IS checked.

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For those looking to make things more convenient for their readers without sacrificing quality, we’re going to check out the option in the File menu called “Save for Web.”

After you choose Save for Web, a new window will pop up. Look for the tab labeled “2-Up” and click on it. That will let you view the original version of your page and the about-to-be-saved version side by side.

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For the settings, choose the drop down menu and look for PNG-8. For me, it says PNG-8 128 Dithered, but the important part is that it says PNG-8.

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Ok, now look for the box where it says “Diffusion” and open the drop down menu. Choose “No Dither.”

Now what we’re about to do is choose how many shades of gray we use in our image. See the input box for Colors? Right now it’s set to 128. We’re going to decrease that and by doing so, we make our file smaller.

For something like Bleach, Naruto, and most shonen series, you can get away with 24 shades of gray. It might sound small, but it’s not. Using the 2-Up window, go ahead and zoom in on your page and examine the gray areas. If you’re not satisfied, increase the number of grays.

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Here are two versions of the same page: one is saved with the “Save as” option and one is saved with the “Save for Web” option set to 24 Colors like above. Can you tell the difference?

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The first file is 568 KB. The second file is 200 KB. I’ll do the math for you: If a volume is 200 pages, a regular Save as volume will be 113.6 MB. A Save for Web volume will be 40 MB. That’s a huge difference!

As I said before, the number of Colors to select from the Save for Web settings depends on the series and how many gray tones there are. For most shoujo, you can get away with 32 colors. Keep an eye on the 2-Up windows, however, and zoom in if you need to. It will be obvious when you need to add more colors:

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Doubled to 60 colors, this gradient is smoothed out like in the original psd.

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Even taking the number of Colors to 60 doesn’t greatly increase the file size. The Bleach page above with 60 colors is still only 256 KB – still much less than 568 KB.

My suggestion is to take 5 minutes of your time and just play with the settings for the series you are working on.

• Use “Save for Web” to save your pages for release
• Choose PNG-8 (not PNG-24)
• Choose No Dither
• Reduce the number of Colors to 24 (or whatever you decide)
• Compare the save to the original using the 2-Up tab
• Adjust the number of Colors if needed (keep an eye on gradients)
• Save

Anyway, I tried this method on an old paperback, and it worked like a charm.

Video Tutorial: How I Debind Books With A Hairdryer

Here’s a gradient that goes from black to white, and then here’s the same gradient with the Film Grain Filter (settings 8/2/2). See how both the black and white ends are more gray?

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If you want the black side to be black or if you want the white side to be white, I suggest using a Gradient Overlay, which can be found under Blending Options when you right click on the appropriate layer.

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Your Layer Style window will probably look different from mine, but the contents should be similar. For now, let’s focus on Gradient Overlay. These are the default settings:

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Now this is where I throw you a curve ball. We already made our gradient using the Gradient Tool, and we already added a film grain. So why are we adding a Gradient Overlay that obscures the Film Grain? Well we’re actually going to use an OPACITY gradient, not a color gradient.

Click on the drop down menu next to the default gradient to bring up a window with more gradient options. The default gradient is foreground -> background. The one to the right of that is Foreground to Transparent. Choose that one.

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Now double click on the actual gradient (not the arrow for the drop down menu). This lets you modify and customize the gradient.

So let’s start by trying to make the top of our square completely black, and then fading to a light gray at the bottom. As you can see, we’re starting off with the black at the wrong end of the square.

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As the picture states, the top sliders affect opacity and the bottom sliders affect color. We’ll keep color black since we’re trying to make one end of our square black. We have to reverse the opacity sliders, however, and make 0% on the left and 100% on the right. If you click on the top left slider (the black one) you’ll see a number pop up in the Opacity box below. Change it to 0%, and then do the same for the right slider (change that one to 100%).

Now the top edge of the square fades to solid black! You can drag the sliders around and adjust the opacity to tweak the gradient exactly how you want it.

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If you want the bottom to fade to white, just switch the settings around.

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So we have the original black -> white; with film grain; with black -> transparent; with transparent -> white

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After this highly-specific explanation, the more mundane uses of the Gradient Overlay should be apparent ^^

• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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First set your guides like in the Beginner Borders tutorial.

Then use the Polygonal Lasso to create a selection around your panels. You can do one panel at a time or you can do them all at once, it’s up to you. Since the Lasso will snap to the guides, this part should go really quickly.

Stroke the selection and choose Inside. Outside and center will give you crappy corners, so make sure you choose inside.

Also, make sure you don’t draw a border around panels that go right up to the edge of the page. This is covered in the Beginner tutorial if you don’t understand what I mean. When using the Polygon Lasso, you can actually click in the ruler or the scroll bar to place a point off the page.

I honestly think that this method is better than the Beginner method, but I also think it’s slightly more complicated. That’s why I’m saving it for after you can do perfect borders. Better to start off simple and start off right, ne?

By ‘motion lines,’ I mean the lines on an object indicating speed and movement.

I imagine you could do this with a mouse if you were really, really talented, but I highly suggest only using this method if you have a graphic tablet. Sorry ^^;

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1) Make a new layer. You should be used to this by now ^^

2) Cover the motion lines with white. Usually, I’ll use the Pen Tool to draw a path around the area, fill with white, and then stroke with black on a higher layer. That way it’ll be sure to have a nice border.

Since her arm kind of had two distinct section, I made a layer for each part.

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3) Lock the transparency on the layer so that you can only make changes to the areas that have already been inked (the white area).

4) Set the Brush Tool to 1 px for every 1000 px that your raw is high. So for the 3000 px high raws, I set the pencil to 3 px. On a 1200 px raw, I’d use a 1 px Brush.

Now comes the fun part. Lower the opacity of the white layer so you can see the direction of the motion lines underneath. Set the brush to black and scribble lightly across that area. Since the layer is locked, you will only color on the pixels that have already been colored white.

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5) Set the opacity back to 100% after a few scribbles and continue coloring it in until you get to the darkness you want. If you make it too dark, you can switch to white, add a few white streaks, and then scribble over those in black again.

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Since the raw had a lot of white near the bottom of her arm, I added a few white lines with the Pen Tool after I was done scribbling the motion lines. I tapered the strokes so that they faded nicely into the motion lines (see this tutorial for an explanation).

Then I prepared the second part of her arm by making a new layer and covering that part in white.

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I did the second section exactly like the first and added extra white streaks near the bottom. This is the final product.

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Here are some other examples:

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I was messing around with a Jump SQ raw (2000 px height) and precleaned it first with the Diffuse Filter and then the High Pass Sharpening Filter. I don’t use actions, but you could probably set something up.

1) After you have your preclean, make a duplicate of that layer and label it Burn, and then do all your burning on that. That way, if you make a mistake and want to go back to the original preclean, you still have a copy.

2) On the Burn layer, use the Magic Wand to select the black areas. Set it with a kind of high tolerance ~50. Chances are it will include the line art and extend to parts of the page you don’t necessarily want to work on quite yet.

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Notice that the Magic Wand selected the face and neck as well as the bubble outline. If you burn these lines, they will appear overleveled. In fact, even if you burned the jacket right now, the edges would become jagged and overleveled.

THE EDGES OF THE HAIR AND SHIRT ARE OVER-LEVELED:

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3) To keep the edges nice and anti-aliased, after making your selection with the Magic Wand, go to the Select Menu > Modify > Contract. Contract by 2 pixels and click OK. Note below that the line art has been deselected along with the bubble outline.

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4) Now, when you Burn, you won’t be burning the pixels at the very edge of the black areas. On the toolbar at the top, set the Range to Shadows so that you only Burn the dark pixels and not the lighter gray ones.

With the black areas still selected, use the Burn Tool to do your inking. By keeping the selection active, you will only affect pixels inside the selection. This lets you be kind of sloppy without messing up other parts of the page. Also, this prevents you from burning the grays, which are not part of the selection.

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At this point, some of you may be saying ‘I don’t see much difference, why should I bother with contracting the selection?’ But you have to trust me on this. There IS a difference, and it could probably be translated as the difference between a LQ scan and a MQ scan.

5) Some of the lighter specks in the black areas weren’t selected with the Magic Wand and so they weren’t included when you used the Burn Tool. After Deselecting, these can easily be covered over with the Pencil Tool and shouldn’t take too long to fix.

This panel took me a minute to ink, and after I cleaned the specks in the white, too, I think it’d pass for MQ.

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6) If you want to spend an extra minute on this area and make it look even nicer, you can touch up the white areas. So if part of the white hair highlights got burned over, you can delete that area of the Burn Layer to reveal the original Preclean.

Like I keep saying, this is not my area of expertise, but I wanted to throw the tutorial out there for all the new people doing speed scans. This method will prevent you from overleveling the edges of your blacks.

*** One last tip for the Burn Tool: DO NOT BURN GRAYS. That’s why I suggest using the Magic Wand to select certain areas. If a dark gray gets selected along with the black, just be careful not to burn it.

Also, if there is a dark gray right next to your selection, sometimes the burn leaks out of the dotted area. It’s kind of annoying, but keep an eye out for it so you don’t ruin your grays.

Aside from overall quality, I was messing around with some Jump SQ raws and discovered that the High Pass filter is really good for darkening line art that has gray tone under it. So it’s great for MQ cleans where you don’t want to spend much time on the gray areas. Also, this does not destroy gray tones the way a denoise program can.

Additionally, it works fine regardless of your raw page size.

This method was passed on to me from abu_89, who says “Warning. Excessive usage of this technique is like drinking alcohol. You know what happens– it might seem cool at the time, but in the end, it just means more work for you.”

Use sparingly!!

For the Jump SQ pages I was playing with, I first precleaned using the diffuse filter.

1. Duplicate the leveled layer twice.
2. On the top duplicate, use the High Pass Sharpening Filter. Go Filter > Other > High Pass. Choose 15 px radius.
3. Set that layer to Soft Light mode.
4. Add a Gaussian Blur. Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Choose 1-4 px (I liked 2.5 px).
5. Merge down to combine the two duplicated layers.
6. Now you should have your original raw layer, a leveled/diffused layer, and a high pass layer. I like to keep all three so that if I ever want to go back and change something, I won’t have to start from scratch.

Like abu said, this method can be abused by repeating it over and over again, but after once or twice, the quality really takes a dive, so please DON’T USE THIS MORE THAN ONCE PER PAGE.

If you are forced to use a small raw (1200 px height or so), then tweak the settings accordingly : something like High Pass 10 px radius and Gaussian Blur 2 px. These numbers aren’t set in stone, but again, keep an eye on your page and make sure you don’t over-do it ^^