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.

Adjustment Layers can help with two main things when cleaning:

1. Original leveling.
2. Cleaning blacks and whites.

This is because when you use adjustment layers to do leveling, you can change the levels as you work!

The button for adjustment layers is on the bottom of your layers window.

Using adjustment layers for leveling
Click it and go to “levels.”
A normal levels window will appear but instead of just applying the levels to your image, it will create a layer.
In the image, I have the levels layer selected.

Because your levels are on a layer, you can show/hide it like other layers. And now, if you double-click on the layer, you can adjust the levels whenever you need to! It’s extremely convinent to do all leveling in this manner because if you don’t level the page perfectly the first time, you can always go back and edit it.

Using adjustment layers for Blacks/Whites
By using the adjustment layers you can easily max out levels to spot dirt on your page without ruining your original levels.
For example, if you use an adjustment layer to max out blacks, dirt in your whites will show up significantly better.

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And vice-versa for finding white dirt in blacks.

Thanks, ani!!

To start, I’ll focus on filling in BLACKS and WHITES.

For this, there are only two rules: Black areas must be filled in completely with black and white areas must be completely with white. Piece of cake, right?

So why do these two rules often get overlooked? I really have no idea. Either there is a speck in the white or there is not. If you zoom into your page and do a really thorough speck check, you won’t have any problems.

There are several different ways to fill in black areas, and this tutorial will use the Polygonal Lasso Tool, though the Pen Tool will work much the same.

BLACKS:

1) Zoom in on the area you want to fill. With the Polygonal Lasso Tool selected, make a series of points along the very edge of the area.

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*** If you make a mistake and click somewhere by accident, hit the BACKSPACE key to undo the last point.
2) When you get back to the beginning of your Lasso path, click on the first point to close the loop. The thin solid line should now become “marching ants,” indicating you’ve selected the area inside your polygon.

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3) Right click and select “Fill” from the menu. Leave the defaults, and just make sure you’re choosing black as your foreground or background color. Click OK, and the area inside your polygon will turn black.

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4) Hit CTRL-D (or Command-D for macs) to Deselect and make the marching ants go away. Now do this for the rest of the black areas ^_^

5) For thin areas or oddly-shaped areas, it’s sometimes easier to just use the Brush Tool to ink something by hand. If I’m being particularly picky, I’ll use the Pen Tool, and then Stroke and Fill the pen path to make it perfect.

The bottom line is that whichever method you choose, the entire area must be solid black.

WHITES:

In general, the black areas will always have to be completely inked over. This is due to the aforementioned crappy magazine printing. If you did a good job leveling, however, white areas will be clean except for a few left over specks of gray “dust”. You don’t have to be as careful covering over these specks as you do when inking blacks.

Again, use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to enclose the area that needs to be cleaned up. This time, you don’t have to be so careful getting close to the border. You just have to make sure all the big specks are included.

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Then just right click and choose “Fill.”

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Again, it doesn’t matter which method you ultimately use for removing specks from white areas, they just have to be removed. Sometimes it’s faster to just use the Brush Tool to manually remove any specks.

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If you’re cleaning for an HQ group, you’ll probably have to cover over gray areas with a new layer of gray. The Polygonal Lasso Tool is good for filling in those areas as well, though to make it look really nice I use the Pen Tool, Fill with gray, and then Stroke the pen path with black to keep the line art nice and smooth.