Hello,

A) SHORT FORM QUERY:

How to eliminate paper texture and pencil marks, but maintain the almost black to completely black ink from drawing scans?

B) LONG FORM QUERY:

I have some scans of drawings that I want to print on mildly textured archival quality paper. The problem is that the scans retain the texture from the original paper that the scan comes from. The consequence of this is that when printed on similar paper as the original drawing there is a doubling of textures – the printing paper and the pattern of the paper from the original scan. This leaves an undesirable, and rather fake looking, doubled texture effect in the blank 'white' areas of the images.

An added two-fold complication is that: 1) The ´black´inked areas of the images are not trully uniformly black due to the colour of the ink, erasing, slight errors and the original paper texture. I would, however, prefer that this subtle, uneven inking is maintained, as it preserves the handdrawn look of prints, but; 2) in the scans there is also the appearance of pencil ghosting that is barely visible in the original drawings. I do not want these pencil marks to be visible. Any simple cutting technique will not do the job as some of the drawings are pointillist, and this cutting would need thousands of repetitions. Additionally, any simple single colour selection technique would not suffice as it is not only pure black, but also dark colours close to black that I need to retain.

So, overall, I basically want to maintain the original ink data, but eliminate the paper texture and the pencil data.

I have been experimenting with a number of different tools, such as the bucket fill plus custom pattern, color select, etc, but I am starting to become overwhelmed with the number of options.

Any pointers appreciated!