Give your black and white art the outline it's missing

Give your black and white art the outline it's missing

While line art works best in the stained glass technique, don't let a good design slip by because it doesn't have an adequate outline. If you have a design with a lot of solid areas of black, it's easy to transform that into more refined line art for this technique. We'll show you how using Photoshop's custom shape, Ornament 2.

To create the custom shape:

• Press D to set the default foreground color to black.
• Choose the Custom Shape tool from the Tools panel.
• Click the Fill Pixels button on the Custom Shape tool options bar.
• Choose Ornament 2 from the Shape preset picker, located in the Ornaments set of the Custom Shape Presets.
• Press and hold down [shift], and draw the custom shape on your canvas.

To refine the lines:

• Select the Magic Wand tool from the Tools panel.
• Deselect the Contiguous check box and set the Tolerance to a low number; we used 1.
• Click on an area that's black to select all the black pixels in the shape.
• Choose Select > Modify > Contract.
• Enter 10 in the Contract By text box and click OK. Depending on the resolution and complexity of your image, you may need to enter a different amount.
• Press [delete] ([Backspace] in Windows) to delete the extraneous black pixels.

Don't flip flop between RGB and CMYK (CS3/CS4/CS5/CS6)

Multiple conversions between RGB and CMYK color space can degrade your image file since Photoshop rounds off the color values each time it makes a conversion. The best workflow is to make all of your image adjustments in RGB mode, then convert images to CMYK if you need the files separated that way for printing purposes.