Cleaning Up Line Hatching Drawings

D
Posted By
doyle60
Dec 20, 2004
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915
Replies
3
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Closed
What is the best way to clean up line drawings, with cross-hatching, in Photoshop? I have some old artwork from the 19th century I would like to clean up for printing in a magazine.

The background should be white, of course, but mine has some coloring from aging. I’m working with, sadly, photocopies, and it is the best I can do.

To make a white background, I chose this area with a certain variance and Photoshop did a good job of not selecting the black or dark grays. With this area chosen, I than swiped my eraser tool over the image and cleaned it right up in a nanosecond.

It looks good on the screen, excellent even. But will it look good in a magazine? My method must have deleted some good grays, even if very light. The lines are now very rasterized, black and dark grays against white, but no light grays to soften the lines. My tutorial on rasterized images tells me that these light grays soften the curve and, quite paradoxically, make the line sharper.

I used a 400 dpi file, I believe. Would it help to begin with a finer image? Or will this just be lost on the printer?

Should I use a different methodology? Please suggest one if so.

Thanks,

Matt

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J
jjs
Dec 20, 2004
"DOYLE60" wrote in message
What is the best way to clean up line drawings, with cross-hatching, in Photoshop? I have some old artwork from the 19th century I would like to clean up for printing in a magazine.

Redraw then in Illustrator. Or use Adobe Streamline for a head-start. In the end, you should go vectors all the way.
MR
Mike Russell
Dec 20, 2004
DOYLE60 wrote:
What is the best way to clean up line drawings, with cross-hatching, in Photoshop? I have some old artwork from the 19th century I would like to clean up for printing in a magazine.

The background should be white, of course, but mine has some coloring from aging. I’m working with, sadly, photocopies, and it is the best I can do.

To make a white background, I chose this area with a certain variance and Photoshop did a good job of not selecting the black or dark grays. With this area chosen, I than swiped my eraser tool over the image and cleaned it right up in a nanosecond.

It looks good on the screen, excellent even. But will it look good in a magazine? My method must have deleted some good grays, even if very light. The lines are now very rasterized, black and dark grays against white, but no light grays to soften the lines. My tutorial on rasterized images tells me that these light grays soften the curve and, quite paradoxically, make the line sharper.

I used a 400 dpi file, I believe. Would it help to begin with a finer image? Or will this just be lost on the printer?

Should I use a different methodology? Please suggest one if so.
Thanks,

Matt

To retain the shaded look of the original lines, try using levels or curves on the best looking of the R, G, or B channels. If there are bits of clutter, use the Dust and Scratches filter to get rid of then. If the paper has yellowed, chances are the red or channel will have the best looking image.


Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net
TN
Tom Nelson
Dec 20, 2004
To reproduce line art you want the highest resolution you can get. 400 ppi is probably good enough but 600 would have been better and 1200 ideal.

Here’s a more controllable way of getting a high-contrast black-and-white look: Change the mode to Grayscale. Zoom in to 100%. Go to Image>Adjustments>Threshold and move the slider. Find the point that drops out the background without losing fine detail in the drawing. If you’re colorizing the image, change the mode back to RGB.

The image will look pixellated at the boundary between black and white. This is why high resolution is helpful. When you downsample to your working resolution some edge pixels will be averaged to gray. This mimics the aliased look of an original scan, but with the drawing nicely cleaned up.

Tom Nelson
Tom Nelson Photography

In article , DOYLE60
wrote:

What is the best way to clean up line drawings, with cross-hatching, in Photoshop? I have some old artwork from the 19th century I would like to clean up for printing in a magazine.

The background should be white, of course, but mine has some coloring from aging. I’m working with, sadly, photocopies, and it is the best I can do.
To make a white background, I chose this area with a certain variance and Photoshop did a good job of not selecting the black or dark grays. With this area chosen, I than swiped my eraser tool over the image and cleaned it right up in a nanosecond.

It looks good on the screen, excellent even. But will it look good in a magazine? My method must have deleted some good grays, even if very light. The lines are now very rasterized, black and dark grays against white, but no light
grays to soften the lines. My tutorial on rasterized images tells me that these light grays soften the curve and, quite paradoxically, make the line sharper.

I used a 400 dpi file, I believe. Would it help to begin with a finer image? Or will this just be lost on the printer?

Should I use a different methodology? Please suggest one if so.
Thanks,

Matt

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