I have a recipe that someone wants me to engrave on a cutting board. The recipe is on lined paper. What is the best way to remove the lines?
Play with image contrast and exposure to see if that removes them, or paste a line-shaped rectangle over them.
Either method will require careful “touch ups” of the text with a pen/brush tool.
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What color is the ink and what color are the lines?
You can probably adjust channels to wipe out the lines if the colors are right (that is, if the ink, lines and paper colors are all different), then convert to greyscale, then follow @eflyguy’s advice.
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Yup, if there is even a little bit of difference in color you can use a photo editor to completely remove the lines. I like GIMP because it is free.
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Well that complecates things but still doable. Again, a photo editor, but now you will have to manually edit out the lines.
I can’t be a whole lot more specific without knowing what editer you end up with.
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I can edit out lines in Gimp (in Eraser make the area tiny, pick the start of the line then Shift and pick the other end and it moves in a straight line) However the actual writing is thin and scratchy and you will need to go over it all very carefully to get a reasonable result.
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Thank you! It’s scratchy bc it’s her grandmothers handwriting.
In photoshop I would give it a slight blur then adjust levels.
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That blur technique was really good. Going to have to play with that
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I note with pleasure that the recipe is not copy-righted. So I shall now go beg my wife to make an instantiated instance of the design specifications.
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{Ugh! Can someone remind me how to make the file image in this post bigger? I always forget. It IS up there, just above this; that pink-ish splotch 
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{Update: Thank you @arh2! Got it a little better but I’m clearly still missing something. Anyway, at least it’s sort of visible. @sldavis810, hope it’s helpful!! }
In Inkscape I used Trace Bitmap with grayscale layers (5 this time, can do more or less) and then deleted the layers that didn’t contribute to the writing. Then combined (really Union) the rest, did a select and delete for the notes in the whole picture section at the bottom and then zoomed in and just walked down the text deleting notes that were not contributing to the written script. That step is greatly helped if your brain likes to hijack you and do repetitive detail nuance work; like mine.
Trick I use when dong this: make the path you are editing (the only path, really) an obnoxious bright color like pink, move it to the top of the layer stack, and make it about 80% opaque. This makes it overlay the original picture and clearly shows what nodes are part of the stuff you want to keep.
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Go back in and where it says something like 6x4 amidst the code for the size, add 00, as in 600x400 and see how it comes out. I also started adjusting the page size to the object and that seems to help too.
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I went hunting in the copyright laws one time, and discovered that recipes are one of the things that can not be copyrighted. 
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I cannot for the life of me figure out inkscape!! Thank you!
Try not trying to figure it out but try to just doodle. pick each button and pull down and play with it… If you can manage to have a second screen to hang all the floating windows in so much the better as you can easier see what is happening, This is my second screen when in Inkscape…
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