Who wants to help a brother out?


Who wants to help a brother out?

I'm looking for a much easier way to turn an image from color to black and white, where the white is white, no grey scale, and the blacks are preserved. SO, for example, the lower image, I want all that brownish tone gone and just the black lines left. No greys, just a solid black and white.

I've found an incredibly long and tedious way to get it done in GIMP, but I was hoping for a simpler more expedient way.

Gracias, in advance.

Comments

Larry Maxwell said…
play with the brightness and contrast then dump it into black and white. i do this all the time

edit, you have to make it gray scale first.
Larry Maxwell said…
hmm ok. yes that red text will have to be adjusted first to keep it clear
https://plus.google.com/photos/...
Did you try colors / Threshold? It's the simplest way, but might not work on all images
Larry Maxwell said…
im playing with it a little bit and the red text is way close to the brown / yellow background. this is where the 'tedious' parts starts to kick in for myself.
Send it to me, in the highest resolution. tombpsyco@gmail.com
Jason ON said…
Larry Maxwell I've tried some of those techniques, watched a bunch of YT videos that didn't help (exactly) and played with some other things.

What I've done in the past was: boost the contrast, convert to black and white and then use the bucket fill to fill in the rest of the grey to white. That's the tedious part because you have to keep the threshold low enough not to detract from the black which means it will only change a little at a time and some of those grey areas change from pixel to pixel. And, as you can see, there's a lot of small areas in there.

Curtis Edenfield I'd like to figure it out myself, but may take you up on your offer sooner or later.
Larry Maxwell said…
i do it in blocks then do a once over. so for trouble areas, ide up the contrast within a selection then after I clear the trouble areas do it as a whole, you dont need bucket fills as it will eat away at the line thicknesses. As I noted, the only issue i had with you image is the red text vs yellow background which is why you see them kinda gone in the example I posted. but messing with it further, If i put a box around each one, it looks allot better.
Ok! You know me. I fairly decent at photo manipulation
Besides I love a good challenge
Larry Maxwell said…
here is what I got when I fixed the red vs yellow. note the line at the top is from the shaded header thing that google did when i tried to screen shot it.
https://plus.google.com/photos/...
Larry Maxwell said…
also fyi, im using photoshop if that matters.
Larry Maxwell maybe between my Gimp knowledge an your PS knowledge we can build something. I have some some specialized scripts for tonal contrast.
Jason ON said…
Larry Maxwell I have no idea what you mean about "a box".

I was kind of hoping for a way to use the color selector, select a "grey" area and then either swipe it out for white or "erase" the color with the eraser, leaving only white.

For what it's worth, I'm trying this in GIMP, but I also tried it in Paint.NET which is a more basic image editor than GIMP. I have other - photo manipulation - programs available but none of them are PS.
Nate Taylor said…
Might be able yo set some alpha channesl to make the background transparent. Then copy/paste into a blank canvas and merge the layers... Might be just about as tricky though as you all have already mentioned the BG and text are close in color
Jason ON Every script, format setup, an paint brushes in PS, can be used in Gimp. Finding specialized scripts can be a challenge. Comb the forums.
Jason ON said…
I played with the Threshold setting a little bit and aside from losing some detail (in the red text, etc) it was indeed fast and easy.
Larry Maxwell said…
here are the steps I took (for this specific image)
I begin by raising the contrast of entire image until the content I want to keep either begins to fade or get covered up by darkening artifacts then I back it off a couple steps.

I then convert it to gray scale and use a selection tool to make a box around problem areas and adjust brightness and contrast of it independently until it matches surrounding areas.

I then continue upping over all contrast and brightness correcting artifacts along the way until upping contrast does nothing more.

If all goes well you should have image close to or better what I have posted.

for images with colors too close together over all, I try to use the gray scale images from separate channels and then combine the ones I that worked decently to get an acceptable image,
Larry Maxwell said…
its important to note that in my example I focused on text but if applied to the pictures, it would look just as good.
Larry Maxwell said…
im pretty sure gimp can do these basic photo shop tasks, just to seem, im installing gimp.
Jason ON Turning a photo in to line art is probably the hardest an easiest. This probably one of my better examples. It has all three levels of stepping it down to line art. Using "Threshold" works best after converting the photo to Grey Scale. From there, you can tune out the mid-tones with contrast an "Threshold" in Gimp. Larry Maxwell how familiar are with Gimp?
https://plus.google.com/photos/...
Mind you, I have spent hours, erasing individual pixels to get the sharpest line art.
Larry Maxwell said…
Curtis Edenfield im imagining the intent of jason is to have something he can photocopy. the texture of the background of his image could create allot of noise. Though it would be cool to see how your way will look applied to this one. try to do a screen shot like i did.
Larry Maxwell said…
i did not really use gimp because it kept disappointing me. (its more about layout and familiarity) im trying it again because it looks way different than I last used it.
Jason ON said…
I'm trying to avoid "hours" of working at the pixel level, too. :D
Larry Maxwell said…
ah its ALLOT different from last time, it seems I can do 'my process' allot faster in gimp :P
Larry Maxwell said…
Jason ON nah, its not hours on pixel level either my way or curtis's. Im a work smarter than harder kind of person. ;)
Larry Maxwell said…
hmm this threshold thing works decently but its still having the red vs yellow issue. though im probably doing it wrong.
Larry Maxwell I tried the screen cap. It's just not enough resolution to work with. I need pics at least 5MP an above to keep the detail. This is another of my conversions to line art.
photos.google.com - New photo by Curtis Edenfield
Larry Maxwell said…
Curtis Edenfield ah. I just extracted the webp and now used that. I am super impressed with gimp right now.
Larry Maxwell said…
this was like 2 minutes. if i used smaller selections and some color separations, could be even better.
https://plus.google.com/photos/...
Larry Maxwell said…
Curtis Edenfield i really need to learn the crap you are doing to make those photos look like that. That is really nice.
Larry Maxwell Yeah I've been a Gimp fan for a while. I'm running Fedora Linux 27, so I have Gimp in native form. Every addon they have for PS can be run on Gimp.
With the screen cap, I got the same results, still pretty dirty. Resolution is King. any thing over 2 Mega Pixels. At 5 MP it would take me a few minutes to tune out those dirty spots where the cresses are.
Larry Maxwell said…
those creases are really ez to select directly and adjust brightness and contrast out. but then again, this isnt exactly as 'photographic' as your stuff
1) Increased the Resolution an the amount of pixels per inch.
2) Desaturated it to remove any color shading.
3) Added Artistic filter Cartoon, This thickens the lines.
4) Threshold, Lowered, to remove the heavier contrast spots.
https://plus.google.com/photos/...
That's the quick an dirty method. Everything after this point would involve a few hours an running scripts on a higher resolution picture to clean it up enough.
Larry Maxwell said…
and with only a tiny bit more noise than my way considering how much more quicker that way sounds.
Larry Maxwell Resolution is king in this. the higher it is, the easier it is to remove extraneous shading an objects. I have a filter for smoothing, but on pics over 5 MP it takes hours to run.
Larry Maxwell said…
Curtis Edenfield yes i see that and it appears that both of our methods comes out MUCH better when it is at least doubled.
Jason ON said…
Ill have to give this a try when i get the chance.
Jason ON said…
Curtis Edenfield yes, thats exactly what im looking for.
Jason ON as you go through the steps, look at what's happening. Like I said, that's quick and dirty. Cleaning up the lines take time an practice.
Larry Maxwell said…
but not that much more time. ;)
Larry Maxwell my biggest hang up was learning how to use layers, an blending. It took me a while to figure out how to do a psuedo 3d effect. Had to teach myself how to turn 2d color pics to line art to get a 3d effect.
Larry Maxwell said…
Curtis Edenfield i would imagine. but for this comparative simple task for jason, its not that much more time to make it cleaner ;)
Stuart O'Neill said…
Curtis Edenfield I've been following this comment stream and with this example finally got that you guys are creating true art. Good job.
Stuart O'Neill Thanks! I've been playing with graphics manipulation for long time now. Go look at some of my posts on G+. I've got a pretty good following because of it.

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