Adobe Photoshop is an extremely powerful program for the graphic designer and photographer alike, another great–although overlooked–way to utilize its power: coloring illustrations. I use Adobe Photoshop to color all of my cartoons; it’s quite easy to do once you understand how. The main issue is being able to color your drawing without losing your line drawing in the process and allowing your custom ink work to shine. In this article I am going to show you the light and dark sides of coloring in Adobe Photoshop.

Before I begin explaining the techniques and tools, I want to be clear; this is aimed towards persons with intermediate to advanced illustration/drawing skills, and at least a basic familiarity of Adobe Photoshop. I’m not teaching you how to draw or ink.

Disclaimer: The following method was developed for constant personal use; it may or may not be the most efficient or ideal for all purposes.

You’ll need an inked illustration, you may draw one yourself or for purposes of this tutorial, you may use the black and white version of my drawing, it’s in .psd file format, and none of the following steps have been completed, so you may follow along with the rest of us. If you choose to use my illustration, please be aware that you may not make any claim of ownership or copyright.

Open–or scan–your image into Adobe Photoshop. Double-click on the only layer in the “layers palette”, it should be named “background” (whether you’re using my drawing, or scanned one in). When the “New Layer” Dialog pops up type “original” into the name field and click OK, this will unlock the layer and rename it to “original”.

Click the “new layer icon” on the “layers palette” three (3) times. On “layer 1” double click on the layer name, this will allow you to edit the layer name in place, name the layer “select it”, for “layer 2” rename it “background” then lastly for “layer 3” rename it “lines”.

You should have four (4) layers, from bottom to top “original”, “select it”, “background” and “lines”. Click on “background” to highlight it, then click the “new layer set folder icon” three (3) times and name them from bottom to top “flats”, “darks” and “lights”. Select the “darks” layer set and change its “blending options” to “multiply”. Do the same for the “lights” layer set but this time choose “screen” from the drop down.

Great now we’re all set, we should have four (4) layers and three (3) layer sets.

Let’s separate the ink lines from the original drawing onto their own layer. Click on the layer named “original” once highlighted click on the tab in the “layers palette” called “channels”, you should see four (4) layers in the “channels palette” now “RGB”, “Red”, “Green” and “Blue” in that order.

Let’s add a new layer, click the “new layer icon” at the bottom of the “channels palette”, this will create a new layer named “Alpha 1”–no need to rename it–we won’t be using it for long, “Alpha 1” will also cause your image to go completely black, don’t panic. Ok, now ctrl + click on the “Blue” layer thumbnail; this will cause a selection (marching ants) to appear in the shape of your drawing over the black background.

Go back to the layers tab, the drawing will still appear to be black with marching ants, this is fine. Go up to the “select” menu and choose “inverse” or (shift + ctrl + i) this will reverse your selection so that it is now selecting the lines instead of the negative space around them.

At this point you can click on the layer named “lines” and then click on the “eye icon” next to the layer “original” to turn it off, you should see marching ants in the shape of your drawing on a transparent background.

Choose the “paint bucket” tool from the “tool palette” and make sure you have black as your “foreground color”. Now go to the drawing and fill in the marching ants with the “paint bucket”. Go to select -> deselect or (ctrl + d).

Let’s put the lines on a white background, click on the “background” layer, and make sure you have white as your “foreground color” and then using the “paint bucket” tool click on the background of the drawing, it’ll fill in solid white, and you should still see your lines.

You should have a black and white inked illustration with the lines separated from the background, so that we can start coloring (the fun part), but quickly before that to save us some time later let’s do one more set up step.

Remember the “select it” layer, go ahead and select it now, then turn off the “lines” and “background” layers and turn back on the “original” layer, use the “eye icons” next to each layer to accomplish this.

Once you have that done select the “magic wand” tool from the “tool palette”, and click on the background of the original layer (the off white bit) this should select the whole background, if it doesn’t your magic wand’s “tolerance” is set too low, and you can raise it to the default of 32.

Now you should have a marching ants selection of the entire background all around your drawing, go to select -> inverse (shift + ctrl + i), then choose the “paint bucket” tool and a black “foreground”, fill the selection on the “select it” layer, this will create a solid black shape over the original drawing in the shape of the drawing.

Go to select -> deselect (ctrl + d) and then turn off the “original” and “select it” layers and then turn back on the “lines” and “background” layers.

Time to color! I always start with the flat colors first as it’s easier and it let’s me set up as I go for the highlights and shadows.

For coloring I like to turn off the “background” layer, but that’s not necessary, it just helps me see the color better. I like to start with the skin (if the drawing has skin); it just seems like a good starting place.

So select the layers set “flats”, click the “new layer icon” and name it “skin”.

Next ctrl + click on the “select it” layer, this will give us a shape selection of the entire drawing.

Choose your skin tone color, I’m going to use #F4CDCD, make sure any colors you want to use are selected as the “foreground” color.

Select the “paint brush” tool from the “tool palette” and make sure you have the default brushes for Adobe Photoshop loaded, if they aren’t loaded, simply click the “menu arrow” in the “brush drop down”, and choose “reset brushes” this will load the default brush set for Photoshop regardless of your currently loaded brushes. Once loaded choose the “hard round 19 pixels”.

Now back on the canvas, staring painting the skin areas of your drawing, on mine he has four skin areas, the head, arms and belly, don’t worry about overlapping onto other non-skin parts inside the drawing, like the pants and shirt, we’ll clean that up later, as for outside the drawing you’ll notice that it’s not possible to go outside the outer lines, because of our ant friends.

You should have something similar to what I have, a partially colored drawing with some overlaps onto other areas. This is easy to fix but a little time consuming and you must have a steady hand and firm control of your mouse.

Grab the “eraser” tool and set it to the “soft round 5 pixels” brush and choose “brush” from the “mode drop down”, this’ll give your eraser a softer smoother edge.

Zoom into the drawing to about 1600%, this will give you the most control over your mouse, you can zoom without choosing the “magnifying glass” by holding ctrl + space. No matter what other tool you have selected, as long as you hold ctrl + space the tool will change to the magnifying glass, then back to your actual selected tool when you release ctrl + space.

Zoomed in, with your eraser, find bits of the drawing where color has bled into an area it shouldn’t be, and then start erasing, this takes some practice and a bit of skill, but once you get it, it’s easy.

From here on just go ahead and finish off the flats using the same methods, choose the colors and go for it, erase as you go, once you’re done with the flats you’ll have something that looks a bit like mine and if you’ve been good with your erasing you’ll have each flat color on it’s own layer, and selectable for doing shadows and highlights! Nice.

Another quick tip while coloring your flats, use your already colored flats as selections to further save time, for instance once you have one area colored and erased, you can alt + ctrl + click to remove it from the already selected “select it” layer, making the area you color next have less other areas it can overlap into and cause some additional erasing time.

Before you move onto the shadows and highlights, you might want to zoom in on your image and do some touch-ups, as occasionally even if you have perfect erasing skills, you will have some voids between colors, due to the way Adobe Photoshop treats selections, it’s very simple to just zoom in and touch up as needed.

Now I am not going to give any instruction on shading and highlighting, as this is up to the individual artist’s style and tastes, but I will explain how to do it quickly and easily on any colored illustration.

The two layer sets we created earlier “darks” and “lights” will be used to house the shadows (darks) and highlights (lights) respectively. To create a shadow layer, first choose the “darks” layer set and then click the “new layer icon”, name it the same name as the layer you want to apply shadows to. I.e. “skin” then, ctrl + click the flats “skin” layer this will select only the flat skin color, allowing you to color without any further erasing (unless of course you make a mistake) you do the same thing for each layer you want to shadow. Now to make the most consistent shadows, use the same color as the flat layer in your “foreground” and choose a brush, hard style if you want clean cell shaded looking shadows or soft style if you want blurred softer shadows, now because we set the entire layer set to “multiply” it will automatically make the shadows when you paint, even though you are using the same color. Very cool, is it not?

Lastly you can add your highlights in the exact same manner but on layers within the “lights” layer set which has been set to “screen”, making it automatically highlight the given color.

There are a couple of minor exceptions, true solid versions of colors, black and white will not let you shadow and highlight in the described manner. For white, light sky blues work well for shadows and yellows work well for highlights, with black there is no true shadow–although I have seen dark blues used in older comic books to portray shadows it really is up to the artist–and a lighter grey makes for good highlights, on other true solid colors like true red or true blue, (baby I love you) you have to manually choose your shadows and highlights.

Now you should have a better grasp on coloring in Photoshop, and I hope you found it useful, thanks for reading.

By the way if you happen to use my line drawing to do your coloring, please link to a copy of the finished piece so I can see. Here’s my finished illustration, enjoy.