• 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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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 ^^

Thanks to Yumi for the original tutorial.

1. Make a copy of the raw background – right click on the Background Layer and choose to duplicate it. Do your leveling on this copy so that you can always go back and try again.

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2. Make sure the Mode is set to Grayscale. Go to the Image menu at the top, go to Mode, choose Grayscale.

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3. From the same Image menu, go Image -> Adjustments -> Replace Color. Set Fuzziness to 80, Lightness to 100 and click the dot-button for Image. Your cursor will now appear as a dropper tool so just click anywhere on the page where it should be white, but isn’t. Click OK. The page should appear very washed out now.

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4. Now we level. See the Intro to Leveling tutorial for an explanation of the Level window. Move the white slider to the left of the white peak, but don’t move the black slider yet.

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For this method, you can over-level the whites a bit as long as you don’t touch the blacks (so you can move the white slide further to the left than the Intro tells you to). Don’t try to get rid of the darkest specks, though, or you’ll sacrifice the rest of the page for a handful of specks. Those you can remove later.

5. Duplicate this leveled layer. Set the copy to 50% opacity and set mode to Multiply (on the Layers window, where it usually says “Normal,” open the drop down menu and choose “Multiply.”)

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6. Go under Filters -> Stylize -> Diffuse. Choose anisotropic and click ok.

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7. Level your blacks now on both the leveled layer and the diffused layer. You can darken the blacks quite a bit now and they’ll look good. (NOTE: Diffuse makes straight lines often look quite squiggly… So be careful with it.) The reason we can get away with over-leveling the whites in step 4 is because we diffuse the blacks to reduce jagged edges. The white slider on the diffuse layer might also need to be tweaked a tiny bit.

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8. Voila! Your page is precleaned!

Don’t be afraid to go through this process a couple times and tweak things differently. Sometimes I’ll have a couple layers with different levels, and then I toggle them on and off to decide which I like best.

After this, you may want to try using the High Pass Sharpening Filter to make your lines a little darker.

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