I need help w/ Digital Inking

[JonnyPyro]

Hi, guys. I'm learning the ropes of digital art w/ my bamboo tablet from WACOM. I'm drawing decently enough now after a month or two of really playing with my tablet, using a 4pt. round brush in Photoshop CS4 and a few layers to clean up my image, but the problem is, whenever I want to lay my final inks, whether I'm using the pen tool or a brush, all of my edges seem to be a bit fuzzy. I F'in' hate it... Even when I take it to Illustrator, either Livetrace butchers it, or if I use the pen tool their to try to ink it in my style... the lines seem to be a very dark shade of grey and incapable of turning to jet black. How can I fix my brushes in Photoshop CS4 to turn nice and crisp, kind of like here? (http://www.farlowstudios.com/tutorials/digital-inking-in-photoshop-cs4-update/)

[daveneale]

Care to post an example?

Could be you just need to up the rez of your file, use a brush with closer spacing (sometimes it's set so the spacing isn't as close as it can be).

The greeness could be a cmyk vs rgb thing?

[waffleKoan]

If you have Illustrator, you can always use the blob brush tool to do your inking - it gives you the same pressure-sensitive control over line weight that you'd find with a brush in PS, but smooths things out into a nice vectored edge.

daveneale has a good point, what pixel dimensions are you working in? If you up the resolution to something substantially higher than final output size, those lines will look razor sharp after the size reduction. Also, make sure you're using a hard-edged brush instead of a soft-edged airbrush, obviously.

As far as the dark gray vs. black goes, depending on what swatch book you're using, you might be using several different 'blacks'. (Process Black, Hexachrome Black, etc.) There are slight variations in the depth of the black, there. Just a couple thoughts, hope I was able to help a little!

EDIT: There's a discussion about Rich Black vs. Process Black here (http://forums.adobe.com/thread/370246)

[JonnyPyro]

http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d143/J0106Preston/sample.jpg

There's the sample of it. I don't remember exactly what it was, I think it was 300 DPI, maybe 200... I don't know exactly how to check since I'm still learning at this, although I've been dabbling with text effects and such in Photoshop for like, 4 years now, maybe a little less.

Illustrator, I only started playing with after I had my Rapid Visualization instructor show me how to use the pen tool back in April or so, since I was hand drawing a few logos for a few flooring/construction companies and I was trying to vector it so it could go the right size. I know that I stuck with the RGB format for my Illustrator files, but yeah, the blob pen and differneent black swatches are news to me. In fact, I'm going to google the pen as soon as I hit post reply, but this is what I had worked on before with Illustrator, and what, in combination with two other images, had me sinking in almost 40 hours into Illustrator trying to learn and realizing I need to switch my major over to design since I thought nothing of the time spent...

http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d143/J0106Preston/colorangelnewfix.jpg

Even the lines were drawn and traced by me as complete shapes to do them, hence why it took forever. I didn't even learn what the gradient mesh was until like 3 weeks after I had finished this.

[Portus]

Ignore Photoshop, either get Painter Tool SAI, Painter or Manga Studio.

[JonnyPyro]

I have them, and the only one I haven't really played around with too much was Manga Studio. Painter... I'm just not getting it too much at all. Do you have some good tutorial links that I can play with and try it out?

[daveneale]

As far as I can tell there are a few possibilities:

1st off. When your drawing a line it looks like your using a few short, jutty strokes, if you want smooth lines you need to be producing them with one smooth stroke-this takes practice, and a bit of ctrl+z'ing.

In your brush settings make sure size jitter is at 0% and set to pen pressure, also your other dynamics box shouldn't be clicked-in fact make sure just the shape dynamics, smoothing, and protect texture should be clicked.

To check if the brush is set to settings that will allow you to draw nice smooth lines: draw a path, stroke the path (with simulate pressure clicked), and if the line comes out smooth (thin to thick to thin), then it means that you should technically be able to draw smoothness, and if you cant, either it's technique, or some other memory issue.

[JonnyPyro]

Alright, it's starting to look good alright. I've taken to making a 45 degree thin brush for when I do the inking by hand, but when I want to draw a path, I think I'm going to stick with like, a 5pt round brush and see how it works. As for the length of strokes, I'm still getting used to it, and of course am always fast to land on teh Ctrl-Z command lol. That drawing up there of course is still one of the lower layers before I clean it up, and the more that I look at it, the more that I hate the eyes and see room for more improvement. Hence the point of practice. But, I think I'm going to tinker with a few ideas and hopefully get a sketchbook put together since I just saw Camara's and think that'd be a good idea for me to do too, to keep track of improvement. I was told it'd take me 6 months to get used to it, although I already feel pretty used to it even though March marked the first time in 6 years that I'd started drawing again so I've got a lot of rust to shake off. Then I was told about a year to master, so I'm working through it all. Although, I do think that I'm wanting to upgrade to an Intuos sooner than later if money allows me to.

[bizarre]

There's a few things you can try-

1: Make sure the hardness of your brush is set to the max. A softened brush will make the blurry lines you're speaking of.

2: Make sure you're using a high enough resolution so that your lines aren't being aliased simply because they're really low res.

3. Try painting with the lasso tool- select an area, disable feathering and antialiasing in your lasso tool, and fill it with black.

[Screeny]

It would appear that you are stroking lines made with the pen tool rather than creating closed shapes around the original pencil artwork and filling the resultant area with black as the linked turorial outlines - this is a technique that I use all the time and the results are very crisp, clean blacks. Don't bother trying to simulate the effects of a nibbed pen or brush in PS as you will end up with a fuzzy and unweighted mess of a line that you have to waste time cleaning up.

You don't always need to simulate traditional methods just because you have a tablet - use whatever technique gives you the desired result - the tutorial to which you have linked provides a technique which is (in my experience) the most effective way of simulating the clean look of traditional inking in PS.

[JonnyPyro]

Thanks. I figured all of that. Unfortunately, the makng of paths and filling them really takes way longer than I want it to, so I've taken a very good liking to Manga Studio EX4. Here's something I've done from there for my intro to design class, I had to make my own clipart to keep from having a royalty free image...

http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d143/J0106Preston/HockeyColors.jpg

Used longer strokes, had correction on to keep shakiness from messing up the lines, and most happiest for me... the design stayed vector based, which made it real easy to make the size that I needed in Photoshop for the coloring. I'm starting to get used to that way, and it came out to be pretty fast. Photoshop,it seems to me, is just going to be a chore if I use it to ink... although I'd love to find more ways to modify my inks. Like, colorizing them a little bit with say, a flesh tone over the lighter sides of the character, while the darker side can be the dark black lines, sort of a modern comic book style look, for instance.