Clean up a scanned drawing with GIMP

hi i'm going to show you how to clean up clean up a drawing that has been done freehand and then it's been scanned or de-utilized and you have some stains in the background some messy lines or you want to modify the background that is some kind of grayish when it should be totally white okay so the program i'll use will be which is a free software uh program for image manipulation i strongly recommend to set the preferences in english if they are not in english this is what you have to do go to preferences interface language english all right and you press ok and to save these preferences you have to close the game and restart again the program okay mine is already in english so i don't have to restart again open your file in menu file open and show the path in your computer keeperino as you can see my drawing um we we are going to crop it we will rotate it to the right 90 degrees and as you can see the top of the paper is very uh white while the bottom is a bit grayish and this is not nice in a drawing so these are the type of things we are going to to modify all right so first of all we go to menu image transform and we will rotate 90 degrees clockwise direction second thing i'm going to crop the picture so using the cropping tool this is the the the toolbox of the program every time you select any of these tools you have selection tools at the top uh this is path drawing tool this is the the color picker this is the zoom in and out uh here you have the tool to move here you have the enlightenment tool this is a cropping tool there are many other tools as well for coloring right for erasing as well we have um the the lettering tool as well and some other fact functions of of the program right we will see some of them today when you use the crop tool make sure please that this option is not selected because if you have the in in the crop tool current layer only when you're cropping the picture this is what really happens and we are not interested in having a transparent background all around all right if you make any mistake just pressing command z or ctrl z at the same time you will go back so please unselect current layer only and select make the frame of the final drawing okay i think mine like this will be fine and once you've got it you click on it all right um next thing i'm going to do is to adjust the levels i'm going to increase the contrast between black and white going to color menu and then levels and as you can see this is what happens when you touch the levels all right this is for the black colors this is for the medium areas all right this is for the white colors all right so the idea is to adjust these three levels using the pickers using this three tools right so if you click on the white picker and you go to the darkest area of the drawing which is this this maybe this point and you click on it you are saying that you want this pixel being 100 white okay while if you just click on the black picker and then you go for example this piece of the drawing that is 100 black okay here we already have a maximum black enemy and and the maximum white and then we just can move this oops sorry this triangle to turn these gray pixels into something very white okay all right once you are satisfied with the contrast you just have to click on okay still we have some pixels at the bottom that are not very clean right for these pixels i strongly recommend to take the eraser these two make sure when you use the eraser that you have the right size you need okay right now my eraser is very small but i can adjust in the two options the size of my eraser okay and i can adjust as well the background color make sure when you use the eraser that the color you have in the back is white color so as you can see if you was like the tool on top of these pixels you will just get everything perfectly white okay if you find difficult to outline some of these of erasing some of these areas use the selecting tool okay you click on the background and then you continue using the eraser on top of it making this you want to eliminate the black contour okay you will just work on those selected areas we still have to clean a little bit the the legs on the feet but let's see we have there is something else we have to raise here if we have stains on the background and on the white surface then we will have problems when coloring okay so i strongly recommend to keep white surfaces perfectly clean and white and with no gray pixels in between all right let's see if we can fix a little bit this this great pixels we have in the in the leg can you feel the difference between the previous one and this one so the the tool i'm using is the fastest selecting tool that selects contiguous regions that is regions that are already closed okay and then the eraser to clean it all right if you want to deselect the surface you just have to click here in uh select none all right we might say we're going to check zooming out if we are satisfied with the result or if we still have any other state on it i think it's pretty clear clean maybe we still have to increase the contrast a little bit so this is why i will go again to color levels and it will make the black color slightly deeper all right okay once we have all the all these changes done you just have to click on file save as xcf file okay and that's it save thank you for listening you

Channel: monica rodrigo

Views: 3,636

Rating: 4.8431373 out of 5

Keywords: GIMP, clean, drawing

Id: MJ8EFn02CAc

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021