Photoshop Tip: Tweaking Scanned Art

Because I write blog articles about using Photoshop for art licensing, I often get queries from artists on how to solve art problems in Photoshop. In many cases, I have no clue but I do love the challenge in finding out so that I can learn new Photoshop techniques and then share them with you. This article is in response to artist Patti Gay's questions on how to adjust and correct her scanned art in Photoshop.

When art is scanned for use in Photoshop, there are often several challenges that artists have to contend with. First, artists may want to remove images from the original background to be used with new backgrounds, in new paintings, or for use in patterns or borders. Second, sometimes moiré patterns (irregular wavy lines) occur in the scanned image which needs to be removed. And the third challenge is aligning and melding several images together if the art is larger than the scanner window. Photoshop has some amazing tools and techniques and below are links to videos showing how some very talented Photoshop experts solved these problems.

Extracting Images from Backgrounds
Read the article "Photoshop Tip: Four Methods to Extract Images/Icons from Scanned Art" for techniques on removing icons and images from scanned art. Photoshop CS5 (expected to be released mid May) will have another method with their new spot healing and fill tool.

Removing Moiré Patterns
The video by Russell Brown called "Make Moiré Go Away" shows two methods in removing moiré patterns.

Merging Paintings
Merging several paintings together is possible with Photoshops auto align command. For those of you that have Photoshop CS3 view "Photoshop CS3 Beta- Auto Align Layers" video. Photoshop CS4 has an align version that has more options and is much more powerful. View the video "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Chapter 1/13 The New Auto Blend & Auto Align Layer Command."

If you have comments and suggestions on more ways in "tweaking" scanned images, please enter them in the comment section below.