There are occasions that, depending on your coloring style, you may want to colorize your inked lines. This is done for many reasons but I do it to add another level of visual interest to the final colored image. Sometimes the solid black of inked lines can over power the color art, especially if the art is cell shaded like my work usually is. In order to bring the power of the strong black lines down in the image, I opt for colorizing my inked lines. Usually with a darker brown. Before Manga Studio, I used to colorize my line art in Photoshop but in order to do so, had to take a few different steps. For example, I had to separate my line art from the white of the page (Check out this tutorial on how that is done in Photoshop). That in itself is quite a few steps. Then after completing the line art separation, I could finally color my line art. That all changed with manga Studio. In a matter of a few quick and simple steps, you can colorize your inked lines. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how it’s done.
As you can see from the image above, the inked lines are all black. The goal here is to knock them back a bit to have them blend a bit with the simple cell shade coloring of the rest of the image.
So our first step would be to click once the layer where our inked lines are in to select it, and go to the Manga Studio menu and choose Layer>Layer Properties.
In the Layer Properties window click once on the Alternate Color of Black tab. Depending on your settings, this will be a shade of blue by default.
This is going to bring up the Color Settings window. Here you can choose the color you want your lines to be. For this example, I chose a darker brown. Once you’ve chosen your color by sliding the color slider (1), you can click on OK.
To turn your black lines into the color you selected, simply click once on the Color View tab in the Layers palette shown above. This will convert your black lines to the color you chose in the previous step.
Here are the results! See how simple it was? For this reason I no longer go through the tedious steps I have to go through in Photoshop to change my line colors. Manga Studio makes doing this and a whole lot more extremely easy and quick!
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