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.