Transcript:
Hey, what is up? Everyone, that’s rich! Alright, welcome to video. This is gonna be fun, so I get a lot of questions about a lot of different things with our making our approaches and all these kind of different things, but one thing that I do get asked a lot is, How do I make blue lines? What dpi are PPI do? I print my blue lines that on and on and on so what I did first is I went on Google and I just searched for David Finch pencils. This was actually for someone a couple of days ago, Jackson. You never texted me back with your email address, so do it. Um, but anyway, so, um, you have the first thing. You know. This is another question. I get all the time, where can I get? High-re’s scans of pencils. Look, the reality is. This is better than any photocopy that I ever got when I was doing my samples to break in. I’m not kidding you until I actually met with Wildstorm and showed them my first sample pack, which I had been inking, Probably at that point for on and off for six to ten months. I would just get like, you know, Fifth six tenth generation pencils. This is already more high-res. I swear to God if I showed you the samples that I worked over. It was insane! How poor they were so. I’m gonna show you one how I prepare this for a blue line. How I convert it to a blue line. I’m gonna show you some shortcuts in Photoshop that I use how to create a set of actions and hopefully I can knock all this out in like, 15 minutes. So, yeah, first thing you’re gonna want to do is go on Google search for the artist you’re interested in, you can go into the settings and select size and go large. I would recommend, so you’re not filtering through things and then just pick the ones that are the best, you know? Beggars can’t be choosers, But I found for what I consider very, very nice pieces. This was a sketch that he did for. CB Cebulski of all people, It’s kind of funny, but this one is the smallest of them and we’ll look at the settings on it and I’ll explain everything so first things first we’ll go an image, an image we’re gonna look at what these are, so they’re actually scanned at 11 by 17 but they’re at 72 PPI. I guess let’s see what this one is, really. Quick, were just just just to get an idea. So this one is control. I’ll remember that in a second, so this one is bigger. This is 28 by 19 So first thing I do is I go control. N or I think in on a Mac, It’s either Apple or command, but when I go control and I’m opening a new document, so I’m gonna create my template at 600 PPI is what I prefer and then I set it to inches and I go 11 by 17 and I want to keep it RGB color because it’s gonna be a blue line. So there we go people will tell me, you know? Oh, clip studio paint. You can do this someone one push of a button. I’m gonna explain why I do it in Photoshop and why it’s better. So do you see all this stuff? The what do you want caught like measuring tools and the indicia and all this stuff? I don’t want any of this on my blue line. I always remove it and I’m gonna show you something else so control. You will bring up the hue/saturation or command you a lot of times when I get my pages from. Say Ryan Benjamin, the blue, okay. Do you remember what the blue looked like? At first, you see how that’s a little bit of a brighter blue? Sometimes people’s scanners aren’t calibrated the same and you’ll see blue lines that maybe you’re drifting a little more into this. Okay, so the problem with this is this isn’t gonna read is a hot of a blue that can be removed easily, so the first thing I do is I go into hue and saturation, and I want to make sure that that cyan is pop and hot, so I actually move the saturation up Because I want to remove all this. The action and clip studio will not remove any of this. All this that does is turn all this blue, but all this junk is still on your page and when you ultimately inked it all. This stuff is still sitting underneath it and to me. It looks unattractive so once. I get it there. I have a set of actions. I can just go in here and I’ve created all these different things a lot of them. I don’t even use some of them. We’re just examples. I’ve never deleted but being blue crops is one. I’ll actually show you manually. How I do this, but I can just hit this and then hit play and remove the blue crops like that. And if there’s any kind of residual, I click on this icon right here, which sometimes will look like a hand clinched. But you can, it’s just, oh, is the shortcut key, not zero, but oh, so oh, is dodge or burn and like you want it set on this one, but then what? I’ll do is I go in here and I can hit this and remove any of the stuff That’s remaining like if there was some of those dotted lines, so I’ll hit the borders with that and even sometimes clean up the pencils. I’d also crop this. I don’t want that extra crop in here. So I mean, you can use the crop tool or I always tend to use the marquee, but I’ll do it this way. I guess I don’t normally use this then. You just hit enter. I crops it and then do you select or key OK so anyway, but, um, so what were the actions that I used to remove all the blue manually? Because you’re not gonna have actions set up yet, and actually, I’ll do it and show you how to do it, so we’re gonna go into this. You may not have this here. I’ve pulled these out and put them in. I don’t really care about the order of them generally, and I’m gonna give credit where credits due Anthony Jones. A aka robot pencil was definitely a huge inspiration on me when I came to Youtube. I was already on Youtube for a couple of years, but the educational value that he provided for people that followed his Youtube channel was tremendous and I actually have bought almost all of his Gumroad videos, so I’ve supported him Full-on because I think he’s great. He has a real passion for teaching in anyway, so he had a a Gumroad video where it was like the basics of Photoshop, how to set up Photoshop for concept art, so a lot of this, I kind of gleaned from him and some of it already knew, but, um, anyway, so, yeah, so if you can’t find it, you can go into window and do you see these, and then you can just select it and then actions will appear somewhere, and if you want to place it in here, you know all this stuff you can pull out and then push back in as soon as you see the blue line up here, then it’s in there so anyway, and you can move it if I want to set it here, you just grab it and drag it so anyway, so when you want to create a new action, you’re gonna go in here and you’re gonna click select this new action, so I’m gonna call this Youtube remove blue, and then I’m gonna hit record and it’s gonna start to record the process that I’m doing, so I’m gonna go control U, which is gonna take me in the hue and saturation, and then there’s a drop down. I know the shortcut key for it, but we’re gonna isolate Blue, Cyan and green, So I’m gonna go control 7 Do you see how that switch to blue? If I go control 6 it switches to cyan. If I go control 5 it goes to greens. It doesn’t really matter what order I do it, but I’m gonna remove all those. So when I’m on Greens which was control 5 or command 5 I’d take the saturation all the way down. I take this all the way down, and it’s recording all this, and then I hit enter. Then I’m gonna go control you control 6 and I’m gonna remove this. I am, I’m gonna click OK or enter control. Oakside control you control 7 and then that in. Do you see how the blue crops are just slowly vanishing away and then? I’m not sure if it records this. I think I’m in Photoshop cs6 right now. CC was giving me problems, but I hit the Oh, I mean, yeah. Oh, the letter, O. And then I’m just brightening this to remove any of that residual pre-existing stuff, cuz. I don’t want any of that on my page. I don’t think you can crop it. In also, you wouldn’t want to, because not every page wouldn’t need the same crop, but anyway, then. I go like that and it’s done so, oh, and I can, you can go like this. Go, ctrl! L do this and then hit this grey area and it will brighten it and remove a certain shade of grey and then press. Stop right here, okay, so now. I’ve created a Youtube. Remove blue set of actions that anytime. I have a page brand-new. I can immediately just remove the crop size, select it and then hit this little play button and it runs through all the actions. And does it immediately for me. So that’s the first step of just cleaning it up now to turn it blue. I just would hit this for myself. This is RGB. Cancel, yeah, and I would go like this and I have a blue line. So two pushes of the button for me pretty much gets me set up for a blue line and I’ll show you the next sequence of events that I do, but before I turn it blue once. I’ve got the crops removed. What I do is I take it and I drop it in my big template, so I’m taking the marquee tool. I’m holding my left mouse button down and I’m dragging it until I have this. Then I go control X, and I’m gonna put it in this template. You’re gonna see how much remember. This is 11 by 17 600 PPI, so watch when I drop this in how small it is, So what I do next is I go control T which is transform. And I’m gonna grab this corner. I’m holding the left button on my mouse down and you don’t want the turn because that will rotate it like what you want. Is you want to grab the corner where it’s going like that and then? I hit shift and that maintains the proportions of the piece, And I’m gonna go like this, but I already can predict. They’ll be people it’s going. This is such a slow, shitty way to do it. It’s fine, make a Youtube video and you can share you the way you do it and then. I pressed enter and then I’m gonna press ctrl F. Oh, you know what, that’s not a shortcut key that you have so in here, you can go layer flatten image. I created that I’ll show you how to make a shortcut key later, but anyway, so now it’s a flat image, meaning that there’s not two layers. Because if you look here when I pasted it in now, I have this layer and I have what they consider the the background layer, which was the template. So if I go Ctrl F, do you see it turns into one layer Now I would go into my actions and I hit turn to page blue and I have my blue line and it’s ready to ink, and this is fine. This is, I’m telling you. This is a thousand times better than any blue line or what I would do is. I would take the photocopy the pencils and take a 1-1 ply sheet of Bristol board with a light box. And that’s how I would do my samples, but this is great you could print. You can take this to a printer right now. Kinko’s, Fedex. Whatever, um, you know, a print shop in your local area. If they have a color printer and can print on Bristol board. You’re good to go, that’s it. So, um, now let me show you that simple sequence of turning it blue, so we’ve got in pencils. You’re gonna go control. You control! Well, you know what, actually this is a color balance one, so I think I go image Adjust the color balance. I’m gonna pull up the cyan. I’m gonna turn it to blue. Take it about to right about here and I hit. Okay, and then I go image Adjust color balance, So control B. I guess I see color balance. Oh, hue saturation and brightness. Okay, so, yeah, so color balance. Take it to the Siam. I know what I did wrong and then take it to blue until it’s looking blue. It won’t be the shade of blue that you want yet, but you want to do this and then go control you, and then go into that hue/saturation and you want to pull the lightness up and lighten it until it’s just about as light as you want it and then go control control B, then take it to cyan again, and then you’re getting your blue more the shade. You want it like? Oh, okay, let me go control you and then lightness, that’s it. You know, that’s a really nice blue line, really, really good perfect. You know, you could crush it on this and 600 PPI, you know, and look if you take a really small, low res file, It’s when you print it out. It won’t be crystal clear, but I’m telling you, it’s still plenty good to ink over, so I hope that helps, and then the other thing I was gonna just show you is how to create a shortcut, so you go into keyboard shortcuts, So say there’s something that you do all the time for me one that I would do all the time is I would go into image mode and I would turn things grayscale, but there was no shortcut key for that, so we’re gonna we’ll create a new one. Let’s see what we’ve got Vibrance. What do I use occasionally threshold? All right, so we’re gonna create a shortcut key for threshold. I’m gonna do Ctrl Alt T. Which is kind of a riff off of my this. Alt ctrl G. So I’m gonna do threshold, so I have to know what menu it’s and so it’s adjustments threshold. So now when I want to create a new shortcut key, because I’ve been using that a lot, it was so what I would do is I go in here. I would go image and then I want to find threshold. Here’s threshold, so it doesn’t have a shortcut key, so I select it and I’m gonna go control and it’s saying the Alt key is already nice with another command if accepted functionality and shortcuts will remove from one or the other, I would click accept, and then I’ve created a shortcut so anyway, that’s a way that you can create shortcuts generally speaking. It will tell you that that, um, you know, there’s already a shortcut command for it. So at least be aware of what the original one was before. You decide to switch it, and there’s many many things in here that I don’t use and so as long as I know that I’ve never ever used whatever Alt Ctrl T would be. Then I’m fine so anyway, that’s how you do it, then you just click accept or accept and that you’re good to go. I’m not gonna switch it right now. So that’s about it. Hopefully that helps you guys and yeah. You can make some really, really nice blue lines, and if there’s any kind of stuff on the board that you don’t like I would recommend if you’re gonna use the Dodge tool to clean it up and do it. While it’s still in greyscale, it definitely tends to work better than using the Dodge tool on the cyan blue, which is sort of the shade of blue. And then finally, once you have, the blue line finished. The last thing you’re gonna want to do is save it. I always save mine as a PDF. I if you’re just saving it as a file to work on in Manga Studio or clip studio. If you’re gonna Inca digitally and you have created the thing in Photoshop, save it as a PSD, so it’s this top one, but for my printer, they prefer PDF, so I save it as a PDF, So I already have it saved here, but I would select in the drop Down PDF. Don’t save it as a JPEG. I mean, you can, but I would. I would say, do P PDF or PSD and you can always ask your local printer what they prefer like. Kinko’s Fedex has Photoshop on their computers so, general, they can open a PSD but just go PDF, And you can always call them and ask if you have a printer in mind and then when you click. Save, I won’t ask you this, but I already have the file saved there so anyway, and then it’ll it’ll give you. These selections so preserve. Photoshop editing bullies is selected optimized for a fast Web preview is selected. I didn’t switch those. Those are just, um, the default settings, and I save it as PDF and make sure you don’t shut it until this is done saving it. And then you’re you’re good to go and that’s a wrap, Okay, Cool, have a good one. Hopefully that helps people. Um, one locate files to know how to do a professional. If you actually look, this is not the version that I was showing you before. I forgot to show you how to save it, so I didn’t remove the crop lines on this one, but that’s why I don’t like them, And in fact, if you watch this, I had that there. I just don’t like this, cuz. Once it’s inked and you have to scan it to share all that stuff still shows up and it’s it’s not as easy to move. Remove through the work as you might think. Sometimes double-page spreads when you work over the original pencils. The stuff is a nightmare because you’ve got now four rows of it. You have one two three and then one two three more on the connecting part so anyway, but alright, it’s a beautiful blue line. You could crush this piece right later.