Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone could share their method for cleaning up
stippled illustrations in photoshop? I create a lot of pen and ink
stippled illustrations of archaeological artifacts. I have always been
dissatisfied with how they turn out digitally. They seem somehow
diminished once I'm done scanning and processing them.

My usual method: I ink with Koh-i-noor Rapidograph pens and ink on
Permatrace (a British brand of Duralene). I then scan at 600 ppi. The
scan always turns out a bit grey so I then take it in to Photoshop to
get it back to black and white. In Photoshop I mess around with a
curves adjustment layer and go in and clean up stubborn grey areas
with a brush. This method sometimes works better then others. I find
that sometimes I have to push the curves so far to get to straight
black and white that the stipple dots are reduced.

I've just found this video on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ADk5zdYiok

which selects and fills the background with white before using curves.
It's definitely an improvement but I still get grey in areas of dense
stipple and cleaning that up by hand is time consuming.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Kathryn

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