Technically comics related, but it made sense to put it here. I'm looking for help from people who are more experienced in image manipulation techniques to give me some advice. I'm actually using Open Office Draw because I'm a cheapskate, but advice on how to proceede will be useful even if you don't know the specific program.

I want to take comics pages and remove the color, to create my own adult coloring book pages on subjects the professional released ones don't cover (a LSH coloring book!). The problem is, I'm not very well versed in these types of apps. The easy path, just making the image black and white, doesn't work because so many of the darkly colored areas turn black. I can color Colossal Boy's face, but his costume is basically all black.

I'm not sure how to proceed. I THINK what I probably need to do is somehow pick out the actual black in the image, and delete everything else. I'm not sure how to do that, or even if it's possible. If someone has advice on how to get what I want, I'd appreciate it.

It's tricky. But you're using the wrong type of program to start with - you're using scans, yes, so a vector/drawing program like OpenOffice Draw or Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org) is less useful than a pixel/paint program like GIMP (http://www.gimp.org) or Paint.NET (http://www.getpaint.net).

It depends what level of fidelity and so forth you're going for too. Using GIMP - primarily Decompose, Color-to-Alpha and Levels - I got from the left to the right in about half an hour. But even granted that it wasn't a great scan to start with, and I did the glowy bits & nametags separately (since they washed out immediately - and I forgot B5's, damn!), it's still noticeably lower-quality than the original. Starting with a cleaner scan (well, digital comic picture) would help, but it's still not something you can really batch unless you have really clean-line, really light-filled images.

I think Reboot is right about the program you're using. It might just be too limited in what it can do. From looking at an Office Draw tutorial page, using the "Charcoal" option might be your best bet as a starting point.

I use Photoshop CS2. I was able to get this by first using the "Sketch-Photocopy" filter. Then I selected the non black areas and copied them from a white background layer, and then placed it above the black layer to get rid of some of the black pixel-like elements.



I think I could get rid of more of the pixels with a couple more white layers, painting, or erasing.

Thanks for the advice. I'll keep playing around with programs and techniques but like you said, it will probably be too time consuming for batch work.

I just realized that there is an entire series of Legion coloring books. It's called showcase presents the Legion of superheroes. :-)

Hah! I had the same idea yesterday looking through the New Gods Showcase. Bit too much black, though. Good luck with your coloring book project!

My artist friend recommended this video.

Following those directions and adding a brightness/contrast layer, I was able to pretty quickly transform this to this.

Hopefully playing with it a bit more will make more improvements, but it's not bad, and something I could knock out a bunch of quickly! This method seems to be VERY sensitive to image quality, though. Experimenting with some other online images showed that I have to have a very high resolution image to get a viable result.