colouring in photshop

nicolo

hey i was once shown a way of colouring in photoshop where you had two layers, the first was the drawing in plain black and white with the white bits transparent,the second was a plain white layer. you put the drawing over the layer and painted on the pure white layer, when i do this it wont work, the paint goes onto the white layer but i cant see it through the uncoloured layer which is meant to be transparent as iv deleated the white bits, any suggestions?

Fysh

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're starting from some sort of scanned image with black & white. In that case, what you can do is right-click on the top layer (i.e. the black & white part) and bring up the layer properties - there's an option towards the bottom half where you can select what range of colour to include on screen. On the left hand side you select how dark you want the darkest part of the layer to be, and on the right you select how light you want the lightest to be. If you drag the end-marker on the right-hand side towards the left you can filter out the white parts of the layer, making it transparent so you can see the colour on the layer underneath.

Hmm. This would be easier to explain if I had Photoshop installed on this machine and could take screenshots...