Cleaning a Scan

First off, the scans themselves should be minimum 200 resolution to maximum 300 (for character linework) I have been doing mine at 200 and it seems to look alright

To get rid of the red line behind your clean line (if you used red as an under drawing) you go to Hue Saturation (Ctrl U) and then in the edit drop down menu select reds. Once selected move the lightness to the max and it should get rid of the red. Similarly if you used blue, then on those frames you would select Blues and change the lightness... however blue tends to eat away at the clean up line as it is so dark and the clean up line itself might have some blues in it.

Once the coloured pencil is gone from behind the clean up, select the Levels Tool (Ctrl L) and move the White slider left until the background garbage is gone while still maintaining a solid line, and then move the black slider up to make it nice and dark. Erase carefully any other crap that is around the character. If there is too much smudging on every frame that wont clean up even with the use of the levels you must not have scanned properly so make sure when you scan you put something heavy enough (and white) over the drawing. The lid itself doesnt always work since it sits ontop of the peg bar and doesnt make complete contact with the drawing.


If you are going to paint in flipbook you will need to save a copy of your cleaned scans as BMP

Hope this helps,


Nate