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Description
Okay. Basically it breaks down like this:

1) Duplicate the original scan. In Photoshop, CTRL-J. NEVER work on the original. Always a duplicate. If you mess up the duplicate, you can always go back to the original, make a new duplicate, and start over.

2) Desaturate to get rid of unwanted color. SHIFT-CTRL-U. Also, if you omit this step, you can get some funky unwanted colors when you do the next step. So, generally, Desaturate is a good idea.

3) Levels. Where the magic happens. Some people use the sliders, I like the eyedroppers. Black and white. Choose your lightest blacks and darken 'em up, and then your darkest whites and brighten 'em up. You generally gotta experiment with this step until you get it to where you want it. Here is where CTRL-Z is your friend.

4) General clean-up after the levels. Adjusting the levels will only get you so far sometimes, especially if you have really light pencils to begin with. So you might have to go in and paint over some of those specks that were just too damned stubborn to die.

So that's it for part one. That's how I get pencil lineart prepared before I start coloring. In part two, I will show how I extract the lines from the white background so that I can do whatever I want with them. (Psst: I mess with the Channels.)

EDIT: If you're using the Mac version of Photoshop, any instance where I mention "CTRL" changes to the Apple key instead. Also known as the Command key. It's got that funky lookin' symbol on it that isn't quite an infinity key. Yeah.

Description
Okay. Basically it breaks down like this:

1) Duplicate the original scan. In Photoshop, CTRL-J. NEVER work on the original. Always a duplicate. If you mess up the duplicate, you can always go back to the original, make a new duplicate, and start over.

2) Desaturate to get rid of unwanted color. SHIFT-CTRL-U. Also, if you omit this step, you can get some funky unwanted colors when you do the next step. So, generally, Desaturate is a good idea.

3) Levels. Where the magic happens. Some people use the sliders, I like the eyedroppers. Black and white. Choose your lightest blacks and darken 'em up, and then your darkest whites and brighten 'em up. You generally gotta experiment with this step until you get it to where you want it. Here is where CTRL-Z is your friend.

4) General clean-up after the levels. Adjusting the levels will only get you so far sometimes, especially if you have really light pencils to begin with. So you might have to go in and paint over some of those specks that were just too damned stubborn to die.

So that's it for part one. That's how I get pencil lineart prepared before I start coloring. In part two, I will show how I extract the lines from the white background so that I can do whatever I want with them. (Psst: I mess with the Channels.)

EDIT: If you're using the Mac version of Photoshop, any instance where I mention "CTRL" changes to the Apple key instead. Also known as the Command key. It's got that funky lookin' symbol on it that isn't quite an infinity key. Yeah.