: How to remove the color fills from this drawing and transfrom lines to B&W vector I'm trying to figure out the best way to remove the color fills from this drawing and transform the gray

@Welton168

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.

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@Sherry646

Make a new white layer below the image.

Magic wand tool settings: "anti-aliased; contiguous; threshold: 50%" (adjust the threshold as needed per-color to get the best result).

Select a colored area using the magic wand tool, and hold shift to keep adding new areas to the current selection. Ignore the page color for now.

With the resulting selection, make a layer mask, deselect.

Select the layer mask in the layers palette (click on it to highlight) and then invert the colors on the layer mask (ctrl+i).

Select the image (click in the image thumbnail in the layers palette), then do "select > color range", choose the paper color, and adjust the fuzziness to something appropriate, perhaps 60.

Select the layer mask thumbnail again, set the background color swatch to black, and hit delete.

You should now have, essentially, just the "drawing outline."

Make a new white layer on top of everything, ctrl+click the layer mask, and then flood-fill the selection with black. Clean this up as best as you can.

Once this is all done, flatten it, convert to greyscale, blur it slightly, and save it as TIFF.

Bring it into illustrator and then use live trace.

In the image below there are three stripes: (top to bottom) the original image; masked version after selection; the flood-filled selection. Obviously, quickly executed and not cleaned up.

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