Line art help

[rabbijan]

This is my first post so I apologize if I'm in the wrong forum. I am a novice Photoshop user and would like to convert photos of my grandchildren to lineart for a coloring book for them. I have found several procedures both on your website and others for doing this but they all give very complex results. I'm looking for something very simple that simulates coloring book art - simple lines with little or no background gray. Is there some way to do this (hopefully through an action which would make it really easy for me!). Thanks for your help. Jan

[philbach]

Well I would suggest you upload one of your photos to this section and let the group work with it some. When you get one that you like they can send you a recipe or action.

[lkroll]

One of the best that I've ran across is Swampy's (Dee Dee's) line-art technique.

[Swampy]

Which can be simplified quite a bit by running a levels adjustment on the resulting B/W line art. Play with the black and white sliders.

[Dave.Cox]

Try playing with the photocopy filter. It might get you close to what you want.

[linus_photo]

Yes, Dave has a good way of doing that, and when You have done it to a photo you tend to get some unwanted spots. What you do then is add a gaussian blur (how much depends on the size of the spots/picture) and when all is blurred, the magic comes with this last step: Image>Adjustments>Brightness/contrast.
Drag the contrast bar way to the left, make sure you keep the white white by using both bars. You might need to do this step more than once. And if you feel that it went to far (to many jagged lines) just go back to the blur step, and apply less blur and redo the brightness/contrast.

If you are going for a print on these images a great thing to do ones you have the line-art is to "convert" them into vectors and use in Illustrator, that way the lines will come out sharp as knives
A fast way is, copy layer to a new channel, make marquee, invert marquee, generate path in paths, and you have the paths, just copy and paste in Illustrator and give it a fill color. Now you can print it any size you want without having to think about resolution.