Working with a scanned drawing

Question

I would like to work on a scanned drawing. It was drawn with a black artist pen and I want to keep it one color in Photoshop. My questions are actually:
how to scan such an image (text, photo?) if I would like to remove the background?
how to remove the background the best?
how to make an image an one color version?
Usually when I wanted to work with a drawing I placed in Illustrator and use Live Trace Option, but it changes much.
I use Photoshop CS3
Thank you in advance,
zerus

Answer 1

The term »text« seems to indicate in your scanner-software what is referred to in Photoshop as Bitmap (actually 1bit bitmap might be more correct).
Maybe you should familiarize yourself with Adjustments – the grayscale scan can easily be adjusted with for example Curves or Levels (best applied as Adjustment Layers) to suppress grays of a certain luminance.
Such Adjustments can also be applied locally by using a Layer Mask for an Adjustment Layer.
By keeping the line-work in a Layer or Group set to Blending Mode Multiply the white parts would not brighten underlying Layers.
Anyway: Are you intending to do the colorization in CMYK or RGB?
CMYK offers the benefit that one can keep the line-work in pure overprinting black (by making it a Layer that only affects black set to Multiply) but then that can also become a problem with larger areas; an RGB image would in separation before printing usually produce a CMYK-black that could, especially with thin lines, produce unnecessary registration problems.