[kasur]

Hello all,
I'm new here. I'm in the process of animating my student film, and have put together a little page explaining my technique for coloring it using PhotoShop. Since this is animation, I'll be painting over 1,000 drawings (and I've only got a couple weeks). For this reason, I really need to streamline and automate most of the process. I'm pretty new at using photoshop for coloring purposes (I've used it mainly for photo editing in the past).

So, if you have time, are a photoshop guru, and just feel like helping a fellow artist out, please read through my (quickly thrown together) technique page and let me know of any ways there would be to simplify the process. Thanks!

Here's a link to the page: DIP using Photoshop

Kevin
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www.kevinelam.com

[ultrahsu]

lots of work, but u can do it.
i'd suggest when u first draw ur lines,
just make them nice n clean, with out breaks,
finish out ur shapes so the whites dont' bleed into each other.
clean it up real quick with levels move white to the left n mess with the grey,
leave the black arrow.
then u can probably just magic wand n get a clean selection, thus skipping all that alpha stuff.
it'll save u a lot of time.

purE
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purE

[Christian +]

I think ultrahsu is right on this one.
If you have only 2 weeks and you really have about 1000 drawings in your scene, you won�t be able to finish on time using this technique.

The way I do it is that I clean and ink my drawings with a 0.3 Uni pin black pen before I scan at 200 ppi.
I open one of the files in Photoshop, create a new Action and adjust the curves to get the back lines of my drawings really clean on a very white background, duplicating the layer containing the drawing (layer1) and setting it to multiply. I also create an empty layer under my layer1 on which I can color afterwards. I save and close.

The most important is to have all your lines closed or else it�ll take you for ever to color you animation.

Once I have my Action ready, I can open all the files in a series of 20 files in a row and apply my Action. Now you have all your frames ready to be colored. You create your palette and open them one by one and fill in the shapes with the paint bucket with the Tolerance set to a 100.

If you want to add shadows, there are different ways to do it, I often use these:
1- duplicate the layer of the colors (layer2), lock its transparency and fill it with white before setting it�s mode to multiply. Put it over the layer2. Now you can use your brush to paint your shadows with a colored light gray which will be multiplied on the colors of Layer2.
2- Set your brush mode to multiply, lock the transparency of layer2 and paint your shadows (also using a colored light gray) directly on the colors. Be careful, there�s no turning back with this technique, your shadows are now part of the colors instead of being on a separate layer.

I think this will do as a quick fix. If you had more time, there are many other techniques which give a more subtle look to the animation.

Remember, if you are compositing your animation on After Fx, don�t forget to add grain to your composition giving it that authentic cell feel. Your teachers will be amazed!

If you are using other software than Adobe After Fx, you can still do this frame by frame in Photoshop using Filter/Noise/Add Noise (set it to 1.2) once you flatten your artwork

Finally you can select the white background with the magic wand in order to create your alpha channels.

Try not to stress too much, you�re supposed to have fun with this.
Good luck, and don�t worry you�ll make it on time.
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