How to remove the color fills from this drawing and transfrom lines to B&W vector
Question
I'm trying to figure out the best way to remove the color fills from this drawing and transform the gray outlines to a B&W vector (or sharp clean edges)--think "coloring book" style.
It's not too hard to do if I do it the time-consuming way--redrawing by hand, basically--but I'm trying to figure out the most efficient way to proceed.
For instance, I tried completely desaturating it, then select color range for the outline part, inverse selection, delete and replace with white, and then image trace in Illustrator--but that produced poor results. That kind of relatively automatable step-by-step is the process I'm trying to achieve... I'd be grateful for any ideas!
Popular Answer
First of all, I second AndrewH's comment from above.
Second: (if you still want to try something else) I would agree with the tools suggested by Yorik but I think you can put them to a better use and get there faster.
- Yes, use Magic Want with anti-aliasi, contiguous at tolerance 40 or 50
- Select the line that you want to keep, not the color you want to delete. (selecting the line will give you a better result)
- Create a new layer and fill it with black
- Copy/Paste the black outline in Illustrator and Trace
PS: The more you play around with Trace settings in Illustrator, the better it should look.