Manga Toning


Before beginning, please note that I expect you to know how to make new layers in Photoshop, at the very least.
Other things, whether obvious or not, I've made sure to point them out to prevent being asked about them later, because as scary as it sounds, it has happened already.
But that's okay, we all start somewhere :)
What's NOT okay is if you come asking about something that has been mentioned here already. But you already knew that.


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 If the line art was inked by hand on paper, scan it and open it in photoshop. Set it to Grayscale (Image > Mode > Grayscale) if it isn't set automatically. If the line art layer is locked and is a "Background", double click it and rename it (in my case, I leave it as "Layer 0"). Once all of the above are complete, add two new layers on top of "Layer 0".


Find the Layers window and there should be three tabs: Layers, Channels, Paths. Click on the Channels tab, and there should be buttons at the bottom of it. Click the button "Load channel as selection" which looks like a dotted circle.

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Your image will be filled with selection ants (you know, those dots...), and should look something like this:

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4 Go to Select > Inverse. Go back to the Layers tab, and highlight the top layer (in my case, "Layer 2"). Then, use the paint bucket tool to fill this selection with black. When finished, deselect. You may notice that the lines appear thicker now, but this will be fixed.

5 Highlight the empty layer below (in this case, "Layer 1"), and use the paint bucket tool to fill it with white. "Layer 0" can be trashed now too.


Although this step is not necessary, I rename my "Layer 2" into "lines" from here on. Create a new layer between "lines" and "Layer 1." This will be the toning layer (or one of many toning layers if you decide to use multiple layers). My toning is basically plain old cel coloring. Select an area with the Magic Wand tool, go to Select > Modify > Expand > 1 pixel, and fill it with a shade of gray using the Paint Bucket tool. Or, if you have a selection of patterns, you can use those instead (to switch between filling with gray or patterns, pick the Paint Bucket tool, find its tool bar at the top, go to Fill and pick Foreground or Pattern).

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If you'd rather brush everything in, use the Brush tool for grays and the Pattern Stamp tool for patterns.

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8 Just start fillin' in.

To give an idea, my page looked like so once all the bases were filled:

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