Isolating Handwriting

[cdpoilievre]

Hi, I am a brand new Glow forge owner and I am so excited to be here. I am overwhelmed and so excited to see all of the wonderful things you are all creating. I am most excited to start creating projects that evoke memories for people. How do I isolate handwriting from recipes for example without getting the lines of the paper they are written on? Thanks so much in advance!!

[dklgood]

You will find that the search function of the forum is your best friend.
https://community.glowforge.com/search?q=remove%20lines%20from%20recipe

[pubultrastar]

Are you a photoshop or illustrator user? Those are the apps that I have used. Unfortunately, it depends on the recipe card, and how dark the lines are. Sometimes you can tweak the settings in image trace and get decent results, but many times you have to clean up the import manually. I’m sure there are lots of threads if you search that can help get you started.

[cdpoilievre]

Illustrator and thanks

[deirdrebeth]

I use GetPaint.net instead of Illustrator - but the commands all exist in both

Here’s how I do it - hopefully that’s helpful:

Engrave Handwritten Recipe

I don’t know of a video one, but honestly it’s WAY more art than technique. Open the photo in your raster program and mess with brightness, contrast, colours, and use the selection tools, the eraser, and the Undo/Redo buttons a lot! Keep working until you’re happy. I cut the image to the area I’m focused on first Then use brightness/contrast to get nice dark print and as close to white background as possible Create multiple layers if the boldness of the print significantly changes in differen…

[kittski]

There’s a few ways to achieve it, but here’s write-up I did showing the technique I use.

Taking the lines out of a hand written recipe

I find the easiest way to get rid of lines on a colored image is to convert it to greyscale and basically deselect the color you want to get rid of. I did a quick example to show what I mean and it took me about 5 minutes to get this far. Obviously it was quick because I have practice, but just wanted to show that it’s not that complicated once you get the workflow down. First I did some image adjustments and used the color-picker to turn the yellow background white-ish. You want the writing …

[cdpoilievre]

Thanks so much, time for practice.

[eflyguy]

A very different discussion reminded me of something that might be useful.

Talking about home automation, I have several lights that you can set to any color.

When trying to separate hand-written notes from printed lines, you can often get a very good image by illuminating with a particular color. You have to fiddle with the settings, but these modern devices often provide a color wheel that you can easily manipulate to change the output.

I’ve only done it a couple of times but it was very effective, and reduced the amount of “clean up” I had to do significantly.

[evansd2]

Can’t that same effect be done by altering the tint or color curves of a plain photo?