Need photoshop help for painting my animated film

[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 (http://home.earthlink.net/~kevinelam/dip_photoshop/ps_dip.htm)

Kevin :)

[Jin]

Hi,

I scanned quickly through your process and one thought comes to mind:

Why not make the background selection and save it as an Alpha channel before running your action to remove the drawing's white background?

Then you can use that selection to both protect the background while painting inside the drawing and to fill the final background with whatever color you want.

Don't know if I explained this well since I'm not more than an intermediate Photoshop user, but that's what I'd do using Painter.

(In Painter, I'd place the drawing on a Layer, create an Alpha channel based on Image Luminance, then load that channel as a Selection and invert as needed to protect whichever part of the image needed protection at that stage of development.)

The point is to eliminate having to manually draw a selection at the end of your process. That'll take forever since you have 1,000 images to deal with.

I like your drawing and painting style, by the way and really like that last stage before you completely fill in the background where the red still has some rough edges. Looks more "rough" and painterly.


Good luck with the project! :)