looking for software for illustration

HQvhs

Not sure if this is the right forum so move this if necessary.

Im looking for software that i can use to add colour to illustrations done in ink on paper. It doesnt matter if its free or not, any software anyone knows about.

I was told recently about a macromedia one that i did know the name of but I just can't remember it!

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Karoma

Freehand perhaps.
Adobe Illustrator, or Photoshop.

heggie

yeh, what you could do is scan in the drawing, outline it in illustrator, bring it back to photoshop, and paint colours beneath the drawing 'layer'

Briony Noh

If you don't know or can't get access to Photoshop etc, try The Gimp. It does EVERYTHING Photoshop does and is FREE (Open Source). And, yes, it'll do the job you're asking about, too. It's available here: http://plasticbugs.com/?page_id=294 (If you're using Linux, you already know about it.)

Scan in the image as normal, use the MAGNETIC MARQUEE to select your colouring area, make a new layer from the selected area, HUE/SATURATION, with use of the lightness control, to recolour it. When finished, you can FLATTEN IMAGE or not to your heart's content.

Each new layer is created immediately above the selected area, so the second layer made from the same image falls between the original and the first layer, though it might still be LAYER 2.

Always make be sure the selected area is the one you intended. It's not critical but it can be a bit of a pain when you miss the area you intended.

You can also do a lot of this using the PEN tool if you need perfection around the edges. Here's a handy Photoshop tutorial, but it works exactly the same in Gimp: http://www.shortandhappy.com/gk37/

Baggio...

Better off using a package such as Illustrator of Freehand.

Although, I've done lots of illustrations and scanned them in to the Compu. My personal preference is Macromedia Flash. I would import the file, and trace it in Flash using the line tool (snap on) then you can colour the image. I realize that the line tool is slightly different in Flash, but once u get to grips with it-it's very fast. If you need any more info give me a PM.

Cheers,

Baggio.

spidermonkey

baggio i think i know what you onabout, but illustrator cs2 has something more powerful called live trace. its brilliant. loads of options.
just scan in your image and open with photoshop & do all nessessary editing, contrast correction, then if its not already, convert it to greyscale, then click the channels tab, and apple-click(alt click for pc) the b&w channel and press delete & thats your white gotten rid of. it might be a good idea to duplicate the layer a few times to increase the saturation and depth of the drawings. then save the image as a png and import into illustrator cs using file-place. then you shoould see various options along the task bar when you click the image. these are your live trace options they will need some tweeking and getting used to before you get a perfect image. but its fu#king class, obviously the bigger the image size the more time it will take toi vectorize. i will throw up one i did a few weeks ago. it took about half an hour to vectorize but it was an A4 300dpi scanned image, about 97mb file size. illustrator is by far my most favourite program and i only know the tip of the iceberg.

Baggio...

Hey SM,

Yeah that's another option alright, that new option sounds pretty cool in CS. Most of my stuff is geared to the web, so I like to keep my file sizes down. So if I trace the stuff in flash it's really clean and the K is tiny. Plus it's well easy to edit. Guess I've been using Flash for too long.:D

Cheers,

B.

my_lenaptalf

A lot of the software mentioned above will do the trick... the key is what you plan to do with the drawing once you fill it in?
Exporting the file or transfering it to other software for other diigtal use will play a factor.