First, a little background. I have limited experience with graphics manipulation, but I need to get this figured out for a project I'm working on.
The attached image was scanned from an old pinball playfield that I am restoring. I have the image saved as a 600 ppi BMP.
The goal is to remove all color except for the black outlines on the car so I can print a waterslide decal of just the black line drawing of the car. I'll physically repaint the base colors of the car then apply the waterslide decal to add the details back in.
What is the best way to accomplish getting a black and white line drawing?
04-09-2017, 05:45 PM (This post was last modified: 04-09-2017, 05:47 PM by rich2005.
Edit Reason: typo
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Something like this: A few ways of attempting an outline
My suggestions:
1. Carfully remove most of the background, either an inverted selection (as shown) and a white fill or just carefully paint in white.
screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/7UCm4su.jpg
2. Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur, a smallish value 10 to 12 This is to smooth out the blemishes in the paint.
screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/9qPbNTn.jpg
3. Colors -> Threshold and carefully pull the slider over to the black (left) side until you get a result. I think 85-90 is good.
screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/0Gj1kJ0.jpg
Still plenty work to do, dive in with a small brush and touch up the remaining blemishes, but it is your masterpiece, take your time.
I know this is a rather old topic, but I just found it and thought it would be the best place to try. I too am restoring a pinball playfield, and have limited artistic ability. The attached pic shows one of the areas I'm dealing with. The paint has flaked off in a number of areas including the lettering and across colors. My thought was to use Gimp to fix the defects in the scan, then separate the colors into layers and use those to drive a stencil cutting machine. I know I can use frisket for major areas of color, but the finer detailed areas seem daunting, and getting the correct lettering, shadowing, etc. seems too difficult for m limited skill, hence the desire to do it via stencil. Any suggestions on where/how to start would be greatly appreciated!
I don't think there is any quick and easy method to do this restoration. It will require lots of time and patience.
One way would be to fix up all the paintwork in Gimp. Then convert to vector.
The other way would be to trace the design in vector graphics (Inkscape). It would need to be a manual trace as the image is too damaged for an automatic trace. This will be time consuming because of the fine detail. Also necessary to find equivalent fonts. Stencil cutting requires vector graphics so this is the way I would go.
10-23-2019, 09:06 AM (This post was last modified: 10-23-2019, 09:07 AM by rich2005.
Edit Reason: typo
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Quote:..the attached pic shows one of the areas I'm dealing with...
That scaled down image, and only part so it is going to be a less-than-simple project. What sort of size is the original? 600ppi but size in pixels? Using Gimp on larger will be easier.
Quote:...but the finer detailed areas seem daunting, and getting the correct lettering, shadowing, etc. seems too difficult for m limited skill, hence the desire to do it via stencil
Tracing the larger areas with some other application is fair-enough. Details You can trace by hand as paths. I would try and find matching (or close fonts) for the text even if not an exact match. Not easy to trace text by hand while text-to-path in Gimp gives a good result. You can try Nimbus Sans L Bold for most, maybe hand trace the awkward ones. That is the same problem using Gimp or Inkscape. Outlines, a path can be stroked in Gimp.
Attached a partial example, about as far as I want to go with that small image. Compressed Gimp, opens straight up.
Thanks for the replies and the tips! The original image is full size, taken with an HP4600 scanner. I did reduce the size to get it to upload; had no idea I could compress it in Gimp and upload that, so I've learned something. I've taken a copy of the image and have been experimenting with it just to get some working familiarity with Gimp, something more than playing with the menus and hoping to find a solution. I tried the color picker to grab a color, then select by color and tried to fill, but that didn't work. So I have been fiddling with color picker, then a variety of pencils to manually fill the areas, Not perfect and a lot of work, but so far it shows promise. I'll try the font idea; a couple of the letters are really toast, but some (the 'V", for example), I've used the line tool to reconstruct the boundaries, then filling.
