any digital inking advice

Any advice for a guy trying to make the move to inking his pencil work with Photoshop?

This is an example of a pencil sketch I've been working on for a chum of mine, but the best inking I can come up with is tracing it with a ballpoint.

I hear Photoshop is a good tool for inking comics these days, but I'm not so savvy on that program as an art tool.

To make your task even tougher, I don't have a tablet.

Any advice?

i rather gimp over photoshop, i can do inking for you free if ye want

BAM!!

Wow that's a great sketch!
Can you ink by hand? like with pen and nibs or with microns or something? Have a light table or anything you can trace over the pencil sketch easily?

You may even want to try Illustrator, it has a funciton called 'Live Trace' that converts it to vector lines. But I don't know much else about it other than that.

Maybe don't even worry about inking it at all. In my experience the whole emphasis on drawing in pencils, then inking the pencils, and then coloring the linework stems from people's interest in traditional comic or anime approaches.

If you're going to take your pencils into photoshop and don't have a tablet, I recommend doing the best you can on the pencils with regard to clean linework, tonal variation, etc. Then scan it in. Your linework will be the default background layer. Make a duplicate layer, set it to multiply, and depending on the quality of your original linework, voila its inked. You may need to tinker with the opacity of the duplicate layer or do some cleanup if sections are to scribbly, but I've seen plenty of top notch digital artists not even bother with any sort of inking stage.

You can also play with the Level Adjustments on the pencils to get a darker feel to them.

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You can also play with the Level Adjustments on the pencils to get a darker feel to them.

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All three suggestions people have offered here are things I've tried and have found to work pretty well once you get the hang of them.

The pen tool in photoshop for one gives you a nice clean line, as Roxstar posted a link to earlier. Its just kind of time consuming, as you're outlineing everything you want to do using a mouse. But you CAN do it with a mouse, which is neato. You dont really need a tablet to do it, and I've tried it a few times when I forgot my tablet at home and wanted to ink something at school.

And as Rowr said, Adobe Illustrator has a cool function called live trace, where once you 'place' a bitmaped image into it it gives you the option of a neato button on top with up to a 0-255 levels of .. umm... vector..izing.. basicly, the higher numbers give you more detailed shapes and lower ones give you blockier ones. But it gives you beautifully smoothly traced mathmatically precise lines from just a picture. Though you might want to ink the picture before posting it in, or do what Roxstar said, and toy with the levels until you get something sharp before putting it into Illustrator.

And like Roxstar said, there's the level function to play with. He linked it and all that. I've seen alot of professional artists just do very clean line drawings, using softer led to do the structure and darker led and pencils to do the actual lines. Just remember to always scan something at a much higher DPI than you'll be using in your final product. It just makes things look a little cleaner when you do. But playing with the level adjuster can get rid of alot of the noise - I just used to use the brightness/contrast window to do it. But the levels thingy works just as good if not better. (I tend to just move the little grey widgit towards the white one until it looks dark, but not pixilatedly so).

Er. Just sort of repeating what everyone's suggested up there. Whats neat is all of these methods don't require a tablet at all, although a tablet tends to make coloring a little faster. Anyhow, I suggest either the cleaned pencil method or inking it by hand and then dumping it into illustrator method, both of those tend to turn out rather nice. And people tend to like the messy 'drawn' feel you get when you have clean pencil lines.

Those are all great ideas. I can't wait to give them a whirl.

Hopefully the ancient versions of Photoshop and Illustrator I have support these new fangled concepts.

This live trace y'all were talking about in Illustrator, what version did that show up in? I'm using Illustrator v8.0 and not finding the option.

That's a cool sketch. Good luck inking it in PS. I'm just learning how to do that now as well. It can be a little tedious, but I think Im starting to get the hang of it.

One question, is that The Ring from champion server?

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One question, is that The Ring from champion server?

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It sure is. I didn't think it'd be that recognizable since this scan doesn't include his cape.

By the way, if anyone has any tips about controlling the pen function in PS, I'm all ears. All the handles and points make no sense to me and experimentation hasn't revealed the secrets yet.

Hey tell Ring I said hi

You digital inking pros need -- need! -- to continue the tutorial giving and finding. I want to see what UB comes up with!

So far, my digital inking has been pretty abortive. I figured out the techincal stuff, I just can't seem to wrap my brain around the pen function. The twisty handle business is just loopy.

The best I can do is to make an arc that comes close to my line, but matching the linework exactly (as I assume most pencillers would want the inks to do) is beyond me.

Can anyone offer some really basic level advice on how to control the pen function?

I could never make heads or tails of the 'live trace' function -- it never seemed to meet any sane definition of accuracy.

If I have time this weekend, I'll try to whip up some sort of tutorial for what I've found useful.

Do that for me and I will find someone to have your babies.

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Do that for me and I will find someone to have your babies.

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Don't look at ME!!

All right. I just spent about forty minutes going over this technique that looks great and can be done with the mouse just as easily as a tablet. Takes a little more time than if you had a tablet (isn't X-mas coming soon?), but it works just fine.

I'll post a tutorial with pics this weekend or thereabouts.

EDIT: Okay, this snazzy technique was actually in Illustrator. I didn't read close enough. Do you have Illustrator?

Okay, I don't think it can be done in Photoshop quite the same way. There's a similar way, but it takes a long time and requires lots and lots of brush size changing constantly and doesn't look as good.

Sorry.

As it turns out, I do have Illustrator, but it's an older version. Lay your tutorial on me, brother, and I'll try my best.