Tue Oct 6, 2009 — by Glenn Hauman

#makecomics Colorist tip: How to un-antialias a file to make flats

Here's a tip that you may rarely need, but when you do, hoooo boy.

Let's say you've been flatting a page for coloring, or you've sent it out to be flatted. The page comes back, and it looks decent-- except when you go to select an area, you discover that the page was created with antialiasing on, which makes it impossible to make a decent selection for further rendering. How do you get the page un-antialiased, without redoing the entire page?

Here's how.

First, you're going to need to the BPelt Flatten plugin for Photoshop. (You may find it and Multifill useful for other flatting jobs as well.)

1. Duplicate the color layer.
2. Apply Filter -> Stylize -> Find Edges
3. Apply Image -> Adjustments -> Threshold at 255.
4. Set layer to multiply and merge down.
5. Apply Filter -> bPelt -> Flatten.

That's it. You'll get an un-antialiased image. Zooming in, you'll go from this:

to this:

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