From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

787 Group your line art, clip to the group

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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787 Group your line art, clip to the group

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- [Male Speaker] In this movie, I'm going to show you how to group your lineart and then take a piece of artwork such as this dark water color right here and clip it to that group and here's the reason why. Notice that we have all these water colors going on inside the lines that represent my face but all the lines associated with the flowers are solid black. We also have a problem with some of our transitions right here. I'm zooming in by the way by pressing the control and spacebar keys, that would command and spacebar on the Mac and dragging and I really want to see my artwork at 200% and so notice that we're looking at all these spiky hairs above the ear right here, on right hand side of the image and notice that in addition to the fact that all those flower lines are black, we have these very brittle edges. Compare that to the final effect in which all of the lines are blenched uniformly. Alright so here's how you pull that off. First of all, just go ahead and zoom back out by pressing control zero or command zero on the Mac and then, I'll grab that layer that represents the flower art and I'll drag it down to just above the floating head and because the layer above it is clipped, it becomes automatically clipped as well. That's not what I want, so I'm going to unclip things by pressing the alt key or the option key on the Mac and then notice if I move my cursor over the horizontal line because I have the alt or option key down, I'm seeing a no clip cursor and sure enough, as soon as I click, all vestiges of clipping go away and start what I want, I want to clip this layer inside both of these guys which mean I need to first group these two lineart layers together by clicking on one and shift click on the other. And then you want to click on the flyout menu icon in the top right corner of the layers panel and choose new group from layers. And then it will allow you to name the group as you created. And so I just go ahead and call this guy lineart and click OK, and now both layers are contained inside this group. Now that you've done that, assuming that you're using a moderately recent version of Photoshop, you can once again press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and then hover over the horizontal line between the dark water colors and the lineart group. Notice now that we are seeing the clipping mask cursor at which point as soon as I click, I go ahead and clip the dark water colors inside of all of the lineart. Bad news is we haven't entirely resolved our problem here. I'll go ahead and zoom back in the 200%. And now that even though the colors are consistent, we still have those bad edges. And that's a function of having selected those edges using the magic wand tool in the previous movie. So here's what we need to do. I'll go ahead and twirl open the lineart group and then I'll click on the layer mask thumbnail that's associated with that flower layer right there. And now, what I want to do is expand the white regions of that layer mask inward and collapse the black the black areas. And you do that by going up to the filter menu, choosing other and then, if you want to make the black stuff bigger, you will choose minimum because black is the minimum luminous level. If you want to expand the white stuff, you choose maximum because white is the maximum luminous level. Very old school stuff here. And I found that the radius value of two pixels work best. If you have access to this preserve option right here, then go ahead and change it to roundness. Otherwise, not really need to worry about it. At which point, you can see that I got rid of those bad edges. And so if I turn off the preview checkbox, keep an eye on this region right here. I turn off preview, you can see those bad edges come back. As soon as I turn preview back on, they go away. At which point, click OK to save that change. And then, I switch to the full screen mode by pressing shift esc or press control zero or command zero on the Mac to center my zoom so that we can see the wonders of grouping your lineart layers and then clipping the dark water colors to that group here inside Photoshop.

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