Removing greyscale, and converting to 'black or white'

[Squirmish]

I'm pretty new to working with layers and would appreciate some of the wisdom evident in this forum.

 

I have a hand-drawn black and white logo of two letters in outline and intertwined, which I created separately, digitised, printed, then painstakingly cut out to do the intertwining (as I have no clue how I'd do this in the box).

 

I added some forward diagonal fill to one letter before printing to distinguish between the two when intertwined but then realised that where I added (pre-digitising) some drop shadow the two blacks are not the same so want to adjust to pure black for 'black or white' printing. I've tried playing around with some of the tools suggested elsewhere, but ineffectively.

 

In addition, (probably because it's an inkjet printer) the fill has blurred into some kind of greyscale during the re-digitisation. Trying to remove that with the magic wand and playing with tolerance is proving difficult. I'll need to add it directly afterwards.

 

I would attach an image of what I'm trying to achieve, but can't work out how to get my  already compressed 1MB file down to 256kb.

 

Maybe the two things I want to do can be done with one tool. In retrospect I could have done this differently.

 

Advice on how to fix this gratefully received in advance. Thanks.

[Disk4mat]

My first thought, depending what is on which layer, is the Adjustment menu, then Levels. That is great for adjusting grey, black and white. I use that to convert pencil drawings into black and white. You can make your blacks deeper without darkening the white.

 

Here is a quick example

https://imgur.com/a/loSFJxa

[Lemonade]

22 minutes ago, Squirmish said:

Trying to remove that with the magic wand and playing with tolerance is proving difficult. I'll need to add it directly afterwards.

AA's Assistant is a really great plugin for softening hard edges (run after using Magic Wand or any Selection tools, good for blur too):

22 minutes ago, Squirmish said:

I would attach an image of what I'm trying to achieve, but can't work out how to get my  already compressed 1MB file down to 256kb.

Upload image to imgur.com or imgbox.com (10MB limit per image) and share here.

[Squirmish]

18 hours ago, Lemonade said:

AA's Assistant is a really great plugin for softening hard edges (run after using Magic Wand or any Selection tools, good for blur too):

Upload image to imgur.com or imgbox.com (10MB limit per image) and share here.

Thanks @Lemonade Here's what I'm trying to clean up, which I'll attempt tomorrow with your and @Disk4mat's suggestions.

https://imgbox.com/MwIHuD6Z

[Disk4mat]

Good thing you posted that image because its not what I was imagining. But here is what I came up with

 

https://imgur.com/a/EpQWZCM

 

You can see my settings that I used and the result. The problem is the areas of the image that appear like its smudged (3 on the right side where there is diagonal line shading). Those imperfections are still visible. You could use the lasso and select those 3 areas and further adjust to make those areas brighter to match everything else.

 

I added a new layer and made it solid white. Then changed the Blending mode to Overlay and that really made the white pop. Then back to the image layer, I chose the brush. Made it 175 in size. Hardness 15%. Selected White, set the Opacity to 24 and dobbed the dark spots.

 

https://imgur.com/a/IGiAkJb

 

It will take time and patience but I think you can get it to where you want it. But try the plugin that @Lemonade suggested. It might be faster and easier.

 

Are you trying to preserve the diagonal shading or transform it to either solid black or white?

Edited June 17, 2023 by Disk4mat

[Red ochre]

Two tone threshold ?

Not 100% certain what results you require, but worth a try. The closer the sliders are together the more 'binary' the black/white effect.

[Squirmish]

6 hours ago, Disk4mat said:

Good thing you posted that image because its not what I was imagining. But here is what I came up with

 

https://imgur.com/a/EpQWZCM

 

You can see my settings that I used and the result. The problem is the areas of the image that appear like its smudged (3 on the right side where there is diagonal line shading). Those imperfections are still visible. You could use the lasso and select those 3 areas and further adjust to make those areas brighter to match everything else.

 

I added a new layer and made it solid white. Then changed the Blending mode to Overlay and that really made the white pop. Then back to the image layer, I chose the brush. Made it 175 in size. Hardness 15%. Selected White, set the Opacity to 24 and dobbed the dark spots.

 

https://imgur.com/a/IGiAkJb

 

It will take time and patience but I think you can get it to where you want it. But try the plugin that @Lemonade suggested. It might be faster and easier.

 

Are you trying to preserve the diagonal shading or transform it to either solid black or white?

Ah, exactly what I'm after, though I want to remove all of my existing diagonal and re-add it properly. I need to have some kind of 'shading', cross-hatch or dot to distinguish the letters I think, and it needs to work in print and online. It's likely going be reasonably small (whatever that means lol - I'm still learning) so I want it to be crisp AND subtle. 

[Squirmish]

Wow, this community is confirming what made me decide on paint.net for my graphics requirements, which for the moment will be originated by hand. I looked at two or three other apps and the support was nothing compared with what I'm seeing here. Thank you for all the helpful suggestions, I will report back.

[Disk4mat]

On now knowing that I took another run at it. This was quick and messy just to see how hard it would be.

 

https://imgur.com/a/zWZoOwb

 

First I when to the Adjustments menu and Selected Black & White. I saw when zooming in there were some colored pixels and that solved that problem. Then I added a solid white layer beneath the image.

 

Using the wand, I selected the shaded areas. Mostly to see what we could get. A tolerance of 52% seemed to work well. You can see the other settings for the wand on my toolbar in the screenshot.

 

Now whats going on in this screen shot...

https://imgur.com/a/y8vulqn

 

We have some jagged edges from using the wand tool to cut the filled areas. I made the top layer not visible (habit so I dont mess with the wrong layer) and selected the white layer. I filled it with black using a 50% pattern fill to get the dot pattern.

 

Moving back to the top layer, making it visible... In the area of my Orange circle, this is where I lightly brushed around the edge to smooth it out. The brush setting was 8 px in size, hardness of 10%, color black. This step only depends on how much you care about the jagged edges. I think you can brush your way around the entire image in 20 to 30 minutes.

[Squirmish]

Okay - trying to learn this stuff on deadline is stressful!  (And lest it seem trivial to you gurus, it's not the only thing going on ATM) I eventually found 'tutorials' which I'll get to later, but for now I've done some of it the long way: I was able to select the outlines with magic wand and bucket black into them - that seems to have got rid of the greyscale. Then just zoomed in and used the eraser to clear out any of the shading the wand wouldn't get, and also used it to smooth off any noticeable jaggedness (which I could have used @Disk4mat's suggestion to achieve.

 

I selected the inside of each of the two letters (one entire, the other in bits) and made a new layer for each, so for the shaded 'S' I could try different types of shading as fill.

 

Current issue is I filled two parts of one of the 'S' layers, then tried to change the fill. Selected each area and hit delete. The larger one cleared, the smaller refused. So I went back to the outline, selected the 'S' bits and made a new layer and a few duplicates of that blank layer (my workaround, and workarounds are not good practice).

 

However,  one of the 'S' layers I filled doesn't respond to the wand - if I  want to try a different fill pattern in one part of it for a momentary comparison. In contiguous mode it makes a small blinking dot wherever I've clicked; in global it's a blue spinning circle that that doesn't accumulate.

1. Is that normal and if so why?

2. Is there another way to do this?

3. Can I somehow sample my fill to identify it? I need to be able to label each version I present.

 

Thanks

[Lemonade]

Is it possible that letter S is still filled with diagonal lines, maybe almost invisible (light grey) chunks? And when you use Magic Wand, some of the lines are selected. If you hold Shift and click, it will sample all similar or exact color based on tolerance.
https://www.getpaint.net/doc/latest/MagicWand.html

Edited June 21, 2023 by Lemonade
Documentation link

[Lemonade]

On 6/21/2023 at 6:50 AM, Squirmish said:

However,  one of the 'S' layers I filled doesn't respond to the wand - if I  want to try a different fill pattern in one part of it for a momentary comparison. In contiguous mode it makes a small blinking dot wherever I've clicked; in global it's a blue spinning circle that that doesn't accumulate.

 

Hey @Squirmish just got the same issue with coloring selected parts. All except two parts were colored correctly. In my case it was a Layer blend mode. When I changed back to Normal, color appeared.

[Squirmish]

Just to close off my post of June 21, I can't mark a particular response as the solution - but they all pushed me to check out tools I'd not interacted with previously. As I said there, I finished the exercise the low-tech way, not having time to dig deeper. I'm primarily a musician so going from pen sketches to digital is a huge leap. I'll try to get back to this great tool before I've forgotten even the basics I learned with your help. Thanks - here's the end result https://imgur.com/a/Dpfpszq