Looking at our fresh scan, there are two immediate problems: 1) The presence of the rough blue pencil work, and 2) The supposedly white paper looks like rolling, grey hills.

The blue is fairly straight-forward to remove. Click over to your “Channels” palette (it’s grouped with the “Layers” palette by default). Photoshop shows you the three channels that make up most digital images – the Red, the Green, and the Blue.

If you see CMYK, you will have scanned your image as a CMYK image. That makes it much more difficult to remove the blue. You can easily convert it into an RBG image by selecting Image --> Mode --> RBG Colour.

Click through the R, the G, and the B channels. You’ll notice that the B channel doesn’t show any of the blue lines. If you drew in Carmine Red, it would be the R channel not showing the rough work.

We’re going to replace the scribbly, multi-coloured image we scanned with the contents of the blue layer. Here’s how:

1) Make the Blue channel active if it isn’t already.

2) Select the entire image (Select --> All, or hit CTRL-A).

3) Copy it (Edit --> Copy, or CTRL-C).

4) Switch back to the Layers palette and activate the “Background” layer.

5) Paste! (Edit --> Paste, or CTRL-V) A new layer will be created, its contents what we copied over from the blue channel.

6) Flatten the two layers into one. Hit the little arrow in the top-right of the Layers palette and select “Flatten Image…” (or hit CTRL-E to merge the layers to the same effect).

Continued on next page...