Turn a pencil scan into a transparent line
Drop the paper out so color can sit under the drawing you already made.
Coloring on top of a white scan fights the paper. Making the paper transparent keeps every pencil decision and lets flats live underneath.
Tools
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Clip Studio Paint
Has a convert-brightness-to-opacity command so paper drops out and pencil remains.
Krita
Color to Alpha does the same job: paper becomes transparent.
Photopea
A fallback using channels or blend modes when you are in the browser.
How to do it
- 1
Clean contrast first
Start from the levels pass in the scan-cleanup workflow. A muddy scan becomes a muddy transparent line.
- 2
Convert brightness to opacity
In Clip Studio Paint use Convert brightness to opacity. In Krita use the Color to Alpha filter and pick the paper color. In Photopea, a channel copy or a blend mode can do the same if you already know that route.
- 3
Check the light lines
Zoom in. Construction lines you wanted to keep should still be there, only lighter. If the command ate them, undo and lift the white point less.
- 4
Color underneath
Put flats on a layer below the line. Do not run a generator over the line layer.