How to Create a Separate Line Art Layer

This Tutorial will demonstrate one method of cleanly separating your comic lineart from the original scanned document in Photoshop. This will allow the artist to color/manipulate image on layer below the original line art.

This process works best with straight black and white images (though it can work with gradient images- but this requires a bit of experimentation to become comfortable with).


1. Open your image in Photoshop. Make sure your image in the grayscale mode- Look at the top of your image, after the title you'll see in parentheses "(Gray/8)" this means 8-bit gray- which is standard. If it says anything else you can go to the image menu and select- image/mode/grayscale.

2. Once you've done that go to your "layers" Palette- Next to it you'll see a tab for the "Channels" palette- select that palette. In that palette you'll see only one layer titled "gray"- Command select that layer. Upon doing that you will notice that all the white has been selected in you image.

3. Switch back to the layers palette and create a new layer and call it Line Art. In this new layer go to the "select" menu and choose inverse.

4. Make sure that your color picker is set the foreground color to black and then hit "option + delete" to fill the selected area with black (command+delete sets the selection to the background color).

5. Go to the select menu and choose deselect.

6. select the background layer and hit command+delete to fill it with white.

7. Now your Line Art is now on a separate layer.