Going from pencil to black digitally

[Eric Young]

I was wondering how to do something in photoshop. How do you turn a pencil drawing into a solid black drawing in photoshop, like inking i guess. The inspiration for this type of drawing comes from the dark tower graphic novels. I have attached an exemple below. This is the process that the artists goes through. After the line art is done it's scanned and it's made into a solid black drawing. (step 1 & 2) I want to know how to do this step, if anyone knows can you please tell me the settings or the process? Thank you.

[Metsys]

I think he just inked it by hand in Photoshop using a hard edged brush. There isn't really a filter that can clean up a pencil sketch and automatically fill it in. I suppose you could use AutoTrace in Illustrator if you set it up right, but with the amount of time it takes to clean up the vector art you might as well just ink it completely in Photoshop anyway; it doesn't take that long.

[feral714]

I can't see the art large enough to tell if he inked over it or just adjusted the values of the pencils. I use levels to adjust my pencils. I'll adjust as best I can and if it's maybe not right I'll duplicate the layer and set the top one to multiply and adjust the opacity until I'm satisfied.
I like the Pens>Scratchboard in painter for inking as of version 9, not sure of other versions.

The Auto Trace (I thought it was 'LiveTrace') in Illustrator only works well if you have real clean and probably real simple pencils. They have to be clean enough to almost look like inks already so it's not really worth the trouble imho. I've used it for cartoony t-shirt designs before but even then I had to edit lots of places. Actually I tried Illustrator but went back to Adobe Streamline and used that. Streamline was a tiny (4mb) program that just did the vector conversion but it's been integrated into Illustrator now.

[PieterV]

I think he just inked it by hand.
You can also use Image > Adjustments > Threshold. That will turn it into black and white. It will probably be a little grainy, but if you're going to paint over anyway...
Perhaps you can lay a copy of the layer on top and set it to multiply before you try the threshold.

[Arshes Nei]

Out of curiosity isn't there a stamp filter that makes that "woodcut" stencil effect?

http://www.mattiassnygg.com/tutorials/corbenandme/corbenandme1.htm

[PieterV]

Haha, thanks for the link Arshes. It works well and it's written really entertaining.