Removing blue lines from your drawings

Skill Level: Easy
What you need:

• Your image, scanned in & ready
• Photoshop CS (other versions should be similar)

Welcome to the first tutorial
Many of us draw in class instead of listening to the teacher, and often the only paper to draw on is lined paper. This tutorial teaches you how to remove those blue lines from your drawing using Photoshop, or an equivalent graphics program.

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1. Open up your image in Photoshop, I'll assume you know how to scan it in and all that. This is the image I will be using:




2. First we'll get rid of the grey bits & creases in the paper. (you may not need this step, depends on the scanner)


Go to Image > adjustments > levels.


3. This box will come up:


Drag #3 to the left until your background is white & generally looks 'clean', it doesn't matter if your lines look very light at this point. Then drag #1 to the right until your lines look dark enough. Adjust the middle one if your image looks like it's too contrasted – just fiddle around till it looks good to you.

Generally speaking, Moving #1 makes the lines darker, #2 makes the whole image (lines & background) darker to the left, lighter to the right, moving #3 left will make the background lighter.

4. Now time to get rid of the lines.


Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation.


Make sure you're 'preview' box is selected. Choose 'cyan' on the dropdown menu (#4), and drag the 'lightness' bar (#5) to the right until the blue disappears, or all the way to the end. Now if you still have bits of blue left (like in my image), select 'blue' from the dropdown image, and drag again, until the lines are all gone.

5. Now you can desaturate your image (make it black and white) by going to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. Or by pressing shift+ctrl+U on PCs or apple+ctrl+U on Macs.

This is the finished image, all nice & lineless

This tutorial idea is really great.

woah, you are good at this. I never knew that there was another way to erase lines. I used to do it the hard way by erasing the lines on the comp, lol. I'm definately going to try this the next time, thanks!

I hope we have more of this, especially tuorials on coluring drawings on the comp.

Cool that nice to know, because i'm always drawing on line paper and this would make my drawing look alot better. Thanks for the help.

Thanks for the Tutorial, Rovie. This one is very helpful.

Wow. This is an excellent tutorial! I know I'm going to end up using it. My best drawings tend to be on lined paper

Thank you so much for posting this!