Tutorial 002 - Roughs

I use my pencil to sketch out the design, then use Photoshop to scan it in. As the pencil is quite light it doesn't really show up very well. In this scan, I've got the settings as "300dpi Colour" so it'll be a nice resolution and look snazzy when printed out, should you want to print it out, but you can't really see much yet.

So, what I do now is use curves to up the contrast nicely. CTRL+M brings up the box thus -

I now click on the diagonal line 1 square along and 1 square up and drag it down to 3 squares along and 0 squares up thus -

>>>>

This will make my picture much more clear. Although it looks quite yellow now, I could happily send this off to my publisher and know that they'd be able to see exactly what was what.

If I wanted to make it less yellow, I'd press CTRL+U to bring up the Hue/Saturation box and drop the saturation right down - maybe even all the way down, but I like to leave a little bit of colour in there and only go to -80 or so, which makes it look like this -

Now all I need to do is draw a marquee around the image ("M" brings up the marquee tool), then go to to the menu bar at the top, press on "Image", look down the list and click on "Crop" and hey presto! The finished rough -

I can now email this off to the publishers.