Professor Diana Schoenbrun | COMD 3313 | SP22

Category: Tutorials

Isolating your line art on a transparent background in photoshop

  1. Scan art in at 300dpi or higher in RGB. Make adjustments with levels or brightness and contrast. 

2. Zoom in and see if the white of the page is pure white and not grey or yellow.

3. Change image to to greyscale. Image>mode >greyscale

4. Open Channels up.

5. Select inside the channel. And hit command.

6. Now do Select Inverse. That will select the line.

7. Now copy onto a new layer, command V.

8. Then adjust levels. Image>Adjustments>levels

9. Move all sliders to the right to increase the darkness.

10. Make sure to add a white background layer behind the line layer.

11. Change file back to CMYK or RGB before coloring.

  • to change the color of the line layer you need to lock the layer and then select your color and paintbrush.

How do you tile an image if you don’t have large enough printer paper?

The ice cream packaging container template can be printed on tabloid (11″x17″) or legal size (8.5″x 14″) paper. However, you can also tile your image and print it on two pages of letter size paper for your class mock-up.

Create a canvas that is 8.5″ x 13″ horizontal in indesign.
Place the .psd, .jpg. or .psd file.
Make sure the scale of the art is 100%.

Go to FILE> PRINT> SETUP

check the TILE box

and change overlap to .25″

Then print. The image will be printed on two pages with crop marks. You can line up your drawing on a light table or glass window. Use clear tape to line up the image.