Been playing around with Krita here and there - I really want to get out of the Adobe ecosystem, but as a cartoonist it's difficult since Photoshop allows me to do so many things in one program. (I don't have that powerful of a machine, so if I wanted to run two graphics programs at the same time for porting between them, I'd have to close pretty much everything else. No bueno.)

There is one thing that I absolutely, positively need to do my work, though, and it's a requirement for best practices if you work in teams for conventional comics making and publishing, and that's Photoshop's threshold tool. Aliased black and white lineart is an absolute must for most colorists.

I can draw with aliased lines, which is great - but when I import scanned lineart I need to be able to do what threshold does. Is there a tool or filter in Krita that can do this?

If not, then move this to the suggestions forum pls, haha. I won't be able to do a lick of comics work until then!

Why don't you use the levels tool? Just press the sliders close together? Or the curves filter for that matter? There's even an index-colors filter under filters->artistic?

Because when working on pages en masse, shaving off extra clicks really means a lot. And for mass printing purposes, knowing for a fact that all you're left with is black and white pixels on lineart is of the utmost importance.

Here's a screencap of what happened when I pinched the level sliders together as much as I could: https://i.imgur.com/l5NO2hS.jpg

The black is nice and aliased, but there's still a lot of color. Not a threshold replacement at all, unfortunately.

Looks like we never added a threshold filter indeed. You're the first one to ask for it in about fifteen years! Adding a threshold filter probably won't take more than four hours or so, but the question is: what threshold filter? If I compare gimp's threshold filter with Photoshop's, the two don't give identical outcomes:



So, which one should it be? Or maybe Histogram shape-based, Clustering-based, Entropy-based, Object Attribute-based, Spatial methods. Local... As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold ... processing.

Another question is, if nobody asked for this in fifteen years, what are all those other people using if this is an essential, unmissable feature for all colorists? So, we need to figure out what part this takes in the workflow, and how we can best support that workflow.

And maybe when Dmitry implements the Lazy Brush tool, thresholding just becomes obsolete, even.

Colorists and inkers who utilize an industry-standard workflow need this. Not everybody who makes comics does, but if you're making comics with the intention of sending it off to a 4-color press where lineart needs to be absolutely black (http://www.graphicpush.com/perfect-black), the threshold tool is absolutely necessary for extracting crisp, aliased lineart.

Aliased is necessary to both make life easier for the colorist when flatting (most flatting is done very quickly with selection tools) and when backing the lineart with gray to prevent ugly ghosting in the off-chance that printing registration isn't absolutely perfect. (It happens.)

And I'm not surprised that I'm the first person to ask in so many years! Most indie comic creators don't work this way to my knowledge, because most indie creators don't print in high enough quantities to merit 4-color printing, and digital printing is far more forgiving if you're doing a run that's only in the hundreds of books instead of thousands. Many indie creators, even the ones who do print runs big enough to make it into the Diamond catalogue (the primary N American comic book distributor), also create pages 100% digitally now, and they might use different workflows. I'm not sure. I've never worked that way.

My workflow, and as far as I can tell, is that of the vast majority of other artists who work for Marvel, DC, Image, IDW, etc., and this is how I was formally taught by several different industry veterans as well:

1. Scan originals, stitch together.
2. Create lineart via theshold tool.
3. Select lineart blacks, and create a layer mask for blacks/color holds (I was taught to put the mask on an entire layer group, and find this is much more forgiving of mistakes if there are a lot of different colored holds. I don't remember if Krita allows masks on layer groups. I haven't gotten that far in my playing around yet.)
4. Create whatever coloring layers necessary above original lineart, color underneath masked lines.

And so on. The rest of Krita's tool set is just fine for completing a page after this; it's all just basic selection-making, fills, gradients, brushwork, etc. At least for me. Some people get more technical, but 95%+ of coloring is just brushwork.

I wouldn't be able to tell you which one would be better (it takes some initial trial and error before an artist can settle on something that works for their lineart and scans), but something would definitely be better than nothing.

A couple of things comes to my mind, not sure if relevant, but based on your image, I see a yellow coloration, this should be prevented at pre-scanning point, ink is not very forgiven neither is pencil, thus a very white background although not easy to achieve is a key before the scans, (inking clean over sheet of pencil and not on it, is a good method, time consuming though), but I don't know if this workflow applies to yours, I mean, where does the yellow came from? that I am not sure. Now scanning, you can actually do (well depending on the software you use) scan line-art and avoid color, and low level background colors from the very beginning. that is very depending of the paper you use and the scanner you have.

I've never use PS (except for a couple of times at school years ago) thus I don't know how its threshold works, I, in the other hand, have used this tool on gimp plenty (to "uncover and clean" words on old documents in real time, to make them readable on the screen), but honestly I wouldn't think on this tool along been good for cleaning scans, because just as it gives, it also takes, details on the picture that is.

If you make the scan on a black and white first (just the scan not the whole document which should be in color) is easier to get rid of whites and grays, living nothing on the layer but the line art and transparency, there you can paint "under" the layer with out the need of masks selections, that gives you more flexibility and Krita would likely work faster too. There is also many other tricks on the blending modes, in the brushes, you can experiment with "Darker" blending mode for example, and make background gray, then get rid of it.

Last but not least, you can make your work digital, save time, ink, paper, money, this would work better for your printing needs I would assume. Many things can be done, if one is open to new methods, just my thoughts

Quiralta wrote:A couple of things comes to my mind, not sure if relevant, but based on your image, I see a yellow coloration, this should be prevented at pre-scanning point,

I scan in color is why - I just don't generally trust scanner programs to figure out the grayscale for me (most pros don't; scanner software isn't nearly as robust as legit photo editing software), and it makes it easy for me to touch up lineart when I can still see the pencils underneath. I pencil with red and yellow (a personal preference after many years of experience), but many people pencil in non-photo blue or regular pencil that they erase. I don't know how many people scan in b&w versus color, but I wouldn't be surprised if many traditional inkers scan in color so that they can tweak their lines in PS.

I've never use PS (except for a couple of times at school years ago) thus I don't know how its threshold works, I, in the other hand, have used this tool on gimp plenty (to "uncover and clean" words on old documents in real time, to make them readable on the screen), but honestly I wouldn't think on this tool along been good for cleaning scans, because just as it gives, it also takes, details on the picture that is.

Of course it's not perfect, but what other way to get aliased black and white? You need a tool for that unless you're inking digitally, which I believe the majority of inkers still aren't.

there you can paint "under" the layer with out the need of masks selections, that gives you more flexibility and Krita would likely work faster too. There is also many other tricks on the blending modes, in the brushes, you can experiment with "Darker" blending mode for example, and make background gray, then get rid of it.

For that you would still need the threshold tool so that you could create clean black lines and delete the whites to create crisp lines to color under. Coloring under a multiply-type layer works for amateurs and digital printing, not for a professional 4-color process. You need to be able to put color behind the lines in some way, and manually is often far too slow.

Last but not least, you can make your work digital, save time, ink, paper, money, this would work better for your printing needs I would assume. Many things can be done, if one is open to new methods, just my thoughts

I've been working digitally for 10 years, I'm actually looking to move back to analog methods of making art. But it'll be a slow process, and part of that process for me is getting away from windows and adobe - if I can trim the fat away from my digital experience, the further along I'll be in that project. I don't much enjoy computers anymore.

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Here's a basic rundown of the general "pro" method of coloring that the vast majority of people in the industry use: http://designinstruct.com/drawing-illus ... photoshop/

And while I can't find a tutorial outlining the process of flatting and prepping the colors underneath the lines, the jist is that there can be no blank white space behind the lines. Most people, AFAIK, select the lines, shrink by a few pixels, and fill with gray underneath them. Other people just fill every space with color, which is a little more difficult and not recommended with extensive black fills because the blobs of colored ink can show behind it after printing.

"I scan in color is why - I just don't generally trust scanner programs to figure out the grayscale for me (most pros don't; scanner software isn't nearly as robust as legit photo editing software), and it makes it easy for me to touch up lineart when I can still see the pencils underneath. I pencil with red and yellow (a personal preference after many years of experience), but many people pencil in non-photo blue or regular pencil that they erase. I don't know how many people scan in b&w versus color, but I wouldn't be surprised if many traditional inkers scan in color so that they can tweak their lines in PS."

I'd still convert the scanned layer to grayscale in Krita, if only to save memory. Unlike Photoshop, Krita can handle images that have different color models for different layers, so you can have an RGB image with a grayscale layer.

"Here's a basic rundown of the general "pro" method of coloring that the vast majority of people in the industry use: http://designinstruct.com/drawing-illus ... photoshop/"

I can add a threshold filter, that's no problem... But that method looks a lot of work compared to using the interactive colorize feature of G'Mic (or the upcoming lazybrush).

See https://phabricator.kde.org/D2304

That colorize tool is VERY neat! I'll give it a go and see what it does for me. I'm not sure it'll save too much time for folks who ink specifically for the old style of coloring, but for less traditional comic artists, that looks like a real boon. (Like the writer of the tutorial said, flatting for artists who draw more organically is more of a pain than people who draw in starker black and white, coloring book style.)

And wow, thanks! I'll be trying both of these out right away.

Hi lokeen,

I know this is a bit late reply, but as wolthera suggested earlier you can use the index color filter. You can create a index color Filter mask on the line art layer or Filter layer above line art layer to get absolute two color (black and white) line art. The original lineart will also be intact. (as an added convenience you can also add color to alpha filter mask to remove the white part of the line art)

In the index color filter dialog just choose the bright and shadow ramps and keep bright to white and shadow to black like shown in the image below


to save you extra clicks you can save these parameters of index color filter as preset. Or you can also have the filter mask setup saved into a template so when you open the template you'll already have the setup you just need to drag your lineart inside it .

About the macros, i can say that linux side has scripts to work on the kra files , I use linux so can't say if there is a way to use these scripts in windows. the kra file is just a zip file which has a mergedimage.png inside it among other things, this helps most artists who use linux to create batch scripts which extract this image and do the operations like crop scale, extend size etc on it, all this without opening krita or hindering your work which is going on in already opened krita, this is handled by the script in a separate process , so this might help you in some way to get closer to what photoshop actions or droplets provide.