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The ImageFX Currents Tutorials have been put into this HTML archive by the following individuals (Listed in alphabetical order):

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• Kermit Woodall

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The ImageFX Layernomicon Part 1
Coloring a Line Drawing Using Layers

By Dave Matthews

If you ever worked on a PC or Mac, you know that layers have become an indispensable part of an artists toolkit. Well, luckily for us Amiga artists, those dedicated folks at Nova Design Inc., have added Photoshop style layers to ImageFX's already impressive abilities.

As the title states, we're going to use layers to color a black and white line drawing. This could be a sketch you have scanned in, clip art, or a picture you drew on the computer. Load your image into ImageFX. If it's a CMAP, convert it to RGB from the color panel. If it's a scan, play with the contrast and brightness controls in ImageFX to get rid of the grunge. You want to end up with good contrast between the dark and light areas. See Figure 1 for my sketch.

Figure 1: sketch

Once you have a nice clean black and white image to work on, save it in INGF format. This is the ImageFX native format, and has support for the layers. Now see the little button to the left of the RGB indicators? This is the layer button. Click it to bring up the layer manager panel. This panel shows the name and state of your layers. The top area of the Layer panel shows the name of your image, and contains the chooser gadget for the Layer menu. The middle part of the panel contains a list of the layers, and their visibility status. If a layer is visible, it has an eye next to it. You can click on the eye to toggle the layer's visibility. Right now it says "no layers defined" because we haven't created any yet. The bottom of the Layer Manager contains the blend percentage slider, the blend mode gadget, and the VCR controls for working with animations. See Figure 2.

Figure 2: Control Locations

Figure 3: Layers Panel

Click on the chooser gadget (down arrow over a bar) in the Layer panel, next to the filename. A menu will popup, choose New Layer. See Figure 3. Now the panel will show the new Layer, listed as Layer 1. Double click on the name of the layer and the Layer Settings window will appear. Click in the Name: gadget and rename the layer to Color. Make sure the Mode: is set to Normal, and the Blend % to 100. Leave the rest of the settings alone, and click Okay. See Figure 4.

Figure 4: Layer Settings

So far you picture doesn't look any different. Now comes the fun part. Pick a base color for your picture, select the freehand drawing tool, and a brush shape and size to your liking. Make sure that the Color layer is highlighted in the Layer panel, and is visible, and then paint over a small area of your drawing. Notice how the paint covers the drawing completely. You have to be very careful not to color over the lines. See Figure 5.

Figure 5: Layer Blend Settings

Now use the Mode: cycle gadget to change the blend mode of the color layer to multiply. Notice how the color layer seems to paint over the white areas, but under the black areas? This mode is very handy for cartoon style drawing where you want the line work to show through. See Figure 6. Go ahead and finish coloring the base colors of your drawing.

Figure 6: Blend Mode Multiply

Now, you have a nice colored drawing but it's flat looking. We can use another Layer, and another Mode to add some depth. Create a new layer, and change the mode to Soft Light. Let's do some shading. Select a dark color. Black will give the deepest effect. Lighter shades will give a lighter shade. You can also use the Percentage slider gadget to change the overall strength of the effect. Lower Percentages will allow for a much subtler look. See Figure 7.

Figure 7: Shading effects

When you've shaded your picture to your satisfaction, create a new layer, again with Soft Light, and this time pick white or a light shade to make your highlights. Again, lower your percentage slider for a more subtle look. See Figure 8. You can also add another layer with Hard Light mode to make harsher more hard edged highlights, such as hot spots. See Figure 9.

Figure 8: Highlighting effects

Figure 9: Hotspots

Ok, save your picture in INGF format, make sure all your layers are visible, and then select the flatten item from the chooser gadget menu. Now you can save your image in a 'normal' format like IFF or PNG. Note: make sure you save in INGF format first though, in case you need to work on the image again, because you can't UNDO a flatten command. Also note if you want to exclude certain layers from the flatten command, turn their visibility off. See Figure 10 and Figure 11 for the final image.

Figure 10: Saving and Flattening

Figure 11: Final Results

Well, there you have it. There's much more to ImageFX layers, including animations, but that's for another article. You can contact me at Lemurtek@zdnetonebox.com.

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