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Getting rid of pesky dirt

So, levels were adjusted in the scanner settings, and white is white and black is black. However, there's still going to be a significant amount of dirt, and a lot of it you're not going to be able to see with the naked eye. Why do you still have to clean it up if you can't see it? Because a cleaner picture makes a smaller filesize. I'm going to explain the easy way to tell where the dirt is and what to do about it. The easiest way to see the pixels that are supposed to be black but aren't or the pixels that are supposed to be white but aren't is to use the magic wand tool. Set its Tolerance to 0 and make sure Anti-aliased, Contiguous, and Use All Layers are not checked.

Now let's take a look at the not-black pixels. Click on a black area and all the black pixels on the page will be selected (unless you missed and hit one of the not-black pixels).



What you want is an easy way to select everything else other than the black pixels. This of course is done by going to the Select menu and choosing Inverse. Now all non-black pixels are selected.



You can now paint black everything that's not black but should be. Of course, that's a lot of black pixels to paint or erase to—this is where Burn comes in handy. (If you find this process frustrating do not dispair; on the next page I will explain an easier way to do things, but that way goes better if you first do some quick work using the following method.)

What the burn tool will do is make almost-black pixels black. Select the Burn tool, with Range set to Shadows, and Exposure to 50%. If you use a 10% hard brush as we did with the Gutter Brightening fixing, you can run it over the black areas without having to be too careful for the edges. You don't want to run the center of the brush over the edges of the black areas—this will make the edges too dark and mess up the antialiasing. But if the edges of your soft brush go over the edges of the black areas, no problems there. It's not like the paintbrush where if you use a soft brush it's still going to do major damage to other areas. Since the Burn range is set to shadows, it has no effect whatsoever on bright areas. You can brush over completely white areas and they'll remain unchanged. Set up an Action to deselect pixels you have made black so that you can tell what you've fixed without having to deselect, use the wand again, and invert the selection again. The action you should set up is 3 steps: Select Inverse, Select Similar, Select Inverse. (Similar is another option in the Select menu.)

After burning the area above and running the action, the result is here to the right, after which you can use the eraser to clean it up a little more, below.

Here are some pictures following the same steps elsewhere on the same page.







An alternative method you can use instead of burning is to use quickmask with a soft brush and use levels, but this seems inefficient to me in most cases since you'd have to paint just as much as you would while using burn, so it might as well get the job done without having to use another step.

Fixing white areas is much the same. Use the wand on a white area, then use the Dodge tool (in the same place as the Burn tool) except using Highlights instead of Shadows, and then use the eraser. But look at the following panel...fixing white dirt is a pain. It's all over the place, because white is the background. Black areas are usually discreet regions that are pretty simple to clean, but white areas have other stuff drawn on top of them and go into very small areas...etc. etc. Stuff in the bubbles is easy...just erase it when you erase the text...and stuff in the space between panels is easy too, but the rest of it can be annoying. Anyway, in the next section I'm going to talk about another way to get rid of dirt.

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