Close up of the Mountains of a Histogram.

A short tool tip for prossesing scanned art!

It’s actually a good thing I think, to not try to get too much contrast with the presets when you scan, I tweak mine a bit but I use colour, and scan the art for the widest range of information.

That leaves me a lot of options in tweaking the final look of the work even before i get into doing and digital shading. The Histogram “mountains” represent the number of pixels of a common value-so colour or tone-stacked from lightest to darkest. So the tallest parts, are where the most of a given value, shade or colour, of pixel there is.

As you’ll see in the clip I use the light, dark, and mid shade sliders, in each colour channel individually, for the greatest level of control over the balance. You could do it in full RGB, but there are little tweaks possible, to get the most out of this when doing the more methodical way I show here. I’ll show you in the next clip in this series, how to use the same technique, to balance scans of tonal artwork.

FYI This clip is done with a vary old version of Photoshop. So applicable to most image editing software that shows a histogram when you edit the Levels/Contrast of an image. Gimp is a powerful popular free alternative. The screen capture was done with CamStudio.