Chapter 12. Line Art: Dreaming in Black and White

With all the frenzy on the Photoshop scene that surrounds cool effects like fractalization, motion blurs, and drop shadows, it's easy to lose sight of the basics. And there are few scanned images more basic than line art.

Line art—those black-and-white images (or bitmap images, in Photoshop terminology) with no halftoning, dithering, or anything else—are as simple as can be. Each pixel is either on or off, black or white, and you aren't concerned with levels of gray or halftones. Scanning, manipulating, and printing these things should be easy. And it is—at least compared to the vagaries that surround grayscale and color images.