I have photoshop (6.0) and I was just wondering are there any good tutorials on editing scanned drawings to make them look professional? make them smoother and outline them correctly?

Anyone?

I would help if I could, but I don't use Photoshop and I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to accomplish.

When I do a physical "pen and ink" or "pencil and paper" drawing and then want to import it into digital format, I do it the hard way: Scan it in, clean it up as well as I can, then redraw by hand in vector format using the scanned image as the base drawing. My primary graphics program is PhotoImpact 12. Essentially I replace the drawn-and-scanned lines with vector lines and objects one by one and then erase the underlying scanned image.

There are programs like CorelTrace that do this for you...to certain degrees of success. My way takes more time, but gives me the most control.

There are some very good scanning techniques to get pen & ink and pencil drawings that will keep you from having to do that 're-drawing' and produce excellent images for sales.

CorelTRACE is pretty much for small things like customers who bring you logos on letterheads and expect miracles - but does work. It would produce FAR FAR toooo many 'editing nodes' if you used it for 'drawings' - and likely crash the program if it was of a larger size.

Other programs - like 'Vector Magic' ($99 last time I looked) will convert your photo to vectors and is said to work very well. There are now other programs that also do the conversion to vectors.

I've seen many great pencil and pen & ink images from scans.
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You need to make sure that the original is as clear and contrasty as you can. Pen scans much better than soft pencil.

make sure your scan is a high enough resolultion. it helps to get smoother lines it you scan it a lot bigger than you need then scale it down. I always scan a line sketch at 600ppi.

I use the GIMP but I'm sure Photoshop could do the same thing. I "select by color" the line I have drawn (if the line you have drawn varies in tone slightly you might have to "add to selection") I copy/paste the line of the drawing into a new blank image. Then its just a case of tidying up any rough bits by hand.

But I can't emphasise enough, the cleaner the original drawing the cleaner the finished result.

I take all my drawings and scan them into photoshop at the highest resolution I can. I will then trace over them with the pen tool to make it a cleaner illustration and easier to manipulate. The darker your drawing the easier it is to trace. I will go over mine with a dark pen or pencil, scan at a high resolution, then trace. If you have Illustrator tracing in that makes it look even better and cleaner. There is no pixelating on the line edges.