: How to prepare pencil sketches for printing in a book? I have a selection of pencil sketches that need to be prepared for print in a book (think standard paperback). I'm trying to work the

@Goswami567

It would really depend on the drawing - hard to tell without seeing it. Is the pencil drawing grey/monochrome? How dark/discoloured/messy is the background?

Anyhoo, if I was to take an extreme case of discoloured dirty background as an example such as this, here's how I would attempt to clean it up.


Scan it in colour.





Apply a Black and White adjustment layer. In this example I moved the sliders for yellow and red to try to get rid of the background.





Apply a Levels adjustment layer, and bring the shadows up by moving shadows slider until it touches the left edge of where the histogram shows there is some detail.





Add a new layer, set the paint brush to white, and paint out any spots or dust remaining on the white areas.


Here's the result side by side with the original for comparison.

Vote Up Vote Down