Need Help with Scanned Image!

I'm generally new to photoshop, and I could have sworn there was a way to do this, so I'm hoping someone might know.

I scanned a lined image into photoshop, and now I want the lines to have opacity so that I may color underneath them, but I am clueless on how to do this. I have photoshop 7, and the link to my image is below. I would really, really appreciate if someone could explain how to do this!

http://www.eternalfall.com/other/brushfiredance.psd

Thank you!

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Brushfire

Do you mean you want to knock out the white background, so you can preserve the line art and then paint /shade underneath the lines???

heathrowe

That is exactly what I mean. Do you know how to do this?

ok, though there are literally dozens of ways to achieve this, I'd propose to an way from the standard Toolbar options.

1. I open up your .psd file and noticed right away that your initial default layer was set to a locked background layer. Double click on that layer to unlock it and ready for editing. This should default to a new layer name of 'Layer 0'.
2. Right click on that same 'Layer 0', and choose duplicate. (Alway back up your original work - precautionary) Duplicating 'Layer 0', should now give you 'Layer 0 copy'. Then hide this layer, 'Layer 0 copy'
3. Right click again on the original layer (thats named 'Layer 0') that you unlocked in the above step, and choose 'Blending Options' from the list.
4. In the main Blending Options default control panel view, go down to the bottom of this panel to the area that starts with 'Blend If', then to the first control slider labeled 'This Layer', drag the far right slider control (Upright White Arrow) to the left and keep an eye on your document and drag as far as you can until all the white in your image disappears.
Note: becuase there is no longer a background layer in this document, you should have transparency.

Click Ok to exit out of the Blending Options.
Again thats just one of a dozen or so ways of doing the same thing.

Few tippers along with this method:
1. When you were in the 'Blend If' section, hold down the 'Alt' key and click on that same far right slider control. Watch it break apart into two halfs, where by you can further control subtle transitions in knockouts.

2. When you clicked Ok to exit the Blending Options panel to comitt the above changes, there is no visible clue in the Layers Palette that you ever did such a thing. (IE, normally when you apply a Drop Shadow it attaches a nested Layer Effect in the Layers Palette) However, right click again on that same layer and you now see the 'Copy Layer & Clear Layer Style' command option activated.

Hope that made sense to you
cheers
heathrowe

Oh.. my.. wow, that's absolutely perfect! Thank you so very much, I.. yeah, this is going to help me out in the future Thank you, thank you, thank you.

awesome good luck with it
for variations on how to extract complex backgrounds check out these tutorials
http://www.heathrowe.com/tuts/knockout.asp?knockout=intro

happy Photoshopping
heathrowe