What's the best way to digitally paint pencil renderings in Photoshop?

[wishcreator]

I've got a pencil rendering I did shading, etc, and I'm trying to color it in Photoshop, but everything's just seeming to turn oout dull or muddy. I'm using multiply layers, color layers, both of these together, all kinds of combinations. Anybody have this problem solved already?

Basically, my goal is to color over the piece, but still keep all of my shading etc with the pencils and have it look vibrant instead of muddy.

[dadamafia]

did you bring the opacity waaay down?

[Octave13]

You might want to "lift" the pencils off the background and make them a seperate layer. This is easy to do, if you don't already know... First, adjust the brightness and contrast so that the background is a nice solid bright white, but your pencils stand out. Make sure you're on the layer your drawing is, then select all (ctrl A) and copy. (ctrl C) Then, go to quickmask mode (Q) and then paste. (ctrl V) Go back to standard mode (Q again) and you'll have a selection. Invert the selection (ctrl +shift I) create a new layer and fill the selection with black (alt delete... if your foreground color is black) Your pencils are now on their own seperate layer, completely independant of the background. Go ahead and delete the background layer if you want, or hide it and create a new all-white background layer. I find this to be a superior method to just using multiply to try and color pencil drawings. Hope this helps.

[Aly Fell]

There's a cool little plugin for Photoshop called 'Eliminate White'. Turn your pencils into a layer, select Eliminate White and whaddya know, it removes all the white from the layer! Leaving your pencils intact. You can then adjust the brightness and contrast to get the edge definition you want. Do this over a white or colour layer, and it can look like the original, but with the pencils on a seperate layer. We used it when cel-shading a series of scanned drawings. It can be done without the plugin, but it just saves time.

You can get it here, but there are loads of other places:

http://www.edesign.com/filters/

[Carnifex]

http://www.apsylus.com/tutorial1.shtml
tutorial for cleaning up properly...works pretty good for me.

[wishcreator]

Thank ya much!

[Storyboard Dave]

Could it also be that you've also invested so much time into your initial shaded drawing you're not willing to use that as a basis to re-draw it specifically to render in Photoshop? Think about using your initial drawing as an underlay, re-draw over it using vellum (keeping your Photoshop techniques in mind) and then scanning in a crisper drawing in to finish coloring it in Photoshop.

[thebluepuppy]

www.thegnomonworkshop.com
check out neville pages digital painting of the wildebeest thing. thats exactly what your looking for from what i gathered. good luck. if your a student you can get it for 50 bucks...small price to pay for knowledge...