How to make a solid line into a dotted-line in Photoshop, when you already have the linework?
Let’s imagine you have used a 3D model in Poser 11 to real-time render white clouds with a lineart edge and a transparency mask.
Lovely. But you also have lines that go into the clouds, and therefore cannot just use a Photoshop Style. Styles, so far as I know, only work on edges. Even when you think you have selected all the linework by colour and converted it to a Path etc. You can see the problem here…
No good. Dotting on the edges, but not on the lines that go into the clouds. What’s wanted as an end result is this…
Here’s how to do that properly, and it can be encapsulated into a one-click Photoshop Action:
1. (If you already know about Styles, just skip to Step 4). First ensure you have Styles visible in your UI Palettes (if not, it’s found at: Top menu | Window | Styles).
2. Dock the new Styles panel behind your usual layers panel. Load the default set of Photoshop dotted line .ASL styles, thus (in the screenshot here I’ve already loaded them). This will not be loaded by default…
3. In your Styles palette you now have a set of (rather difficult to see) new Style presets, which make converting lines to dotted lines one-click easy. Some Styles also remove the white of the cloud (‘unfilled’) and other leave it alone (‘filled’). These can be edited and saved as new custom presets.
You turn ‘unfilled’ / ‘filled’ on and off by this slider…
Ok, we now have Styles set up, know what they do and the panel is populated with a new set of ‘dotter’ Styles.
4. Duplicate your cloud layer, and on the duplicate go: Top Menu | Filter | Stylize | Trace Contour : Level 255. This should remove all lineart lines, while leaving the white intact.
5. Go back to the original cloud layer, and run the Knockout All White for PS action. Now you just have the pure lineart in your layer and nothing else. And, since every line is now an edge, a Style will work on all of it.
6. In your Styles palette, choose your dashed edge Style. No need to make a selection with ‘marching ants’, as we effectively just made a giant selection by knocking out all the white. Applying the Style, you should instantly see the lineart go dotted and/or dashed.
7. Now adjust the layer-stack ranking of your two cloud layers, such that the dotted line layer sits above the Trace Contour layer. If you set them up correctly in the first place, this should not be needed.
Done, now all the cloud lines are dashed. Merge down the two layers…
As you can see your dotted or dashed line from a Style is not going to be ‘vector crisp’, and if you need that sort of thing for website UI wireframes or coupon DTP you probably want some other software, or you need to wrestle with the horrid Pen tool and node-bearing ‘paths’ in Photoshop (shudder…). But the above method does the job in Photoshop, and quickly.
8. Now make the above into a one-click action that looks like this…
Alt + [ and Alt + ] are used for recording such layer-juggling Actions, to move to next and previous layers without actually recording the layer names (which could be anything).
9. Incidentally, you might think about now running your nice fully-dashed cloud through G’MIC. Note that that G’MIC will not launch in Photoshop if such a PNG layer has transparency, as here. In which case, right-click on the layer and ‘Convert to Smart Objects’ first. Then G’MIC will launch for that layer. Apparently the mighty Photoshop still cannot handle more than one area of transparency in a layer, without such a conversion being done.
Thus you may want to add ‘Convert to Smart Object’ to the end of your Action, if you plan to run G’MIC on it.
10. Fuzzy and a little faint the dashes may be. But that can be turned to advantage, if you want you an end-result that looks hand-drawn. You can crisp and ink them up automatically with a filter. For instance, here is my custom ‘Send to Moebius’ G’MIC filter at work on the above lines…
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