Graphics Problem: Scanning image causes grey colour.

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PHL

Guest
Greetings.

Making game graphics is hard because of the grey colour that appears in my scanned images.

When I draw on a clean white A4 paper and colour the drawing, it looks good to me.

When I scan the paper, the white parts of the resulting image look grey! And even the coloured parts are affected; they look darkened.

The scanned image in the computer does not look as good as the original picture on the physical paper. It is that ugly grey colour, although the physical paper is bright white.

How can I make the scanned image look as bright and colourful and visually same as the physical picture?

To get an idea of my trouble, you can see the illustrations in my book: (Download) . I had to manually remove the grey parts with the Magic Wand in the graphics program GraphicsGale.
 

JackTurbo

Member
Hi PHL.

Cleaning up scans of illustrations is a pretty common issue and is just an unfortunately necessity when dealing with a work flow that crosses from physical to digital medium.

Now if you were using photoshop I could help you out with some tips and tricks I've picked up over the years, however I've never actually used Graphics Gale so cannot help out on that front too much.

Having just taken a look at GraphicsGale however I would suggest that you may find it easier using an application that is more geared towards the task as it looks like GG is more of an animation and pixel art suite. If you're looking for free software you might be better off using GIMP for this...
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Yeah, GIMP is pretty awesome for things like this.
  • Colors-->Curves lets you change the overall brightness easily, drag the curve upwards to brighten and downwards to darken.
  • Filters-->Artistic-->Cartoon lets you make lines thicker, useful to make drawings look cleaner if they're pure lines and no shading. It's usually a good idea to maximize the 'mask size' parameter to reduce the effect of noise pixels.
  • Colors-->Threshold reduces everything to black and white, and is useful for turning a pure-lines image into something you can color in as pixel art.
  • Stretching something to a smaller size with Sinc (Lancoz) interpolation is useful to reduce few-pixel noise without blurring stuff too much.
 
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