I'm skipping the pencils/inking stage here and just concentrating on the colouring process. The first stage therefore is to transform your inked black & white linework into a colour template for you to start colouring.

Your inks will probably be saved in a black & white, or greyscale .PSD file format. I work on my inks at very high resolution, which would be slow to colour initally. So the first thing I do is resize my inks to a much lower resolution, to enable me to work nice and fast. I can resize my colours later, and working at lower res has the added bonus or allowing you to blend colours a lot easier!

My inked originals for this image were 3431 x 6827, and my resized working colours were done at 1000 x 1990. So once you've resized you file to a usable size, you'll want to turn it into a colour file.

In your Photoshop menu select - Image > Mode > RGB Colour

You don't want to risk ruining all the hard work you've put in on the inking. Therefore you'll first want to convert your inks to a new layer (this will keep the line art seperate from the colour layer, and allow you to colour without affecting the line art).

Locate your Layers/Channels palette, and click on the Channels tag. Drag the Blue Channel (highlighted red) into the "New Channels" icon at the bottom of the window.

This will create a new "Alpha" channel, which you should then inverse (using Ctrl + I).

Click on the Layers Tag and create three new layers. You can call these whatever you want. However, to save confusion, I'll call the top layer "Inks", the second layer "Colours" and the third layer "Flats".

Select your "Background" layer containing the line art and clear it. Don't worry you haven't lost the line art, it's still there on the "Alpha" channel.

Click on the "Inks" layer and go to Select > Load Selection in the main menu bar.

When the pop-up window appears choose "Alpha 1" in the channels box and click ok.

You'll now get a selection in your "Inks" layer which you need to fill with black (click on it with the fill/paint bucket tool).

Congratulations, you should now have the following;

1. "Inks" layer containing the line art

2. "Colours" layer for yep you guessed it, your colours

3. "Flats" layer for your flats (more on this in Step 2)

3. "Background" layer for adding backdrops etc

Here's a video of the entire process..

Right click to download a High Definition video (3.63 mb)