Problems with removing colors

[Siva]

So I'm having a bit of a problem with an image I want to work on. I need all the colors removed so only the black outline remains, is there a program or an easy way to do this other than use paint and hand erase each color?

[Knittenkitten]

I'm not sure but I haven't had the need to do that. I have removed colors and bakcgrounds that weren't neede but I tend to do that by hand. One idea may be to use the lasso tool in your program and use it to block out the areas that you want removed. Not sure if that helps or not.

[funkymonkey]

If your drawing software has a magic wand tool, it will allow you to select areas of color that you can delete. If you import it into KG-Chart, you could then right click colors in your palette and delete them out.

[Siva]

Thanks for the advice. Sadly all I have is the microsoft paint program. If I import it into KG, can I then save it as a normal jpeg? I want to embroider the image so I dont really need it pixelated. I think I will put it as a pattern request so that if someone have fancier software maybe they could do it. If not I will be spending my free hours for the next while removing colors.

[Aggie Tsubi]

I usually use the methods funkymonkey describes, or I'll just drag a box to highlight a section in my image editing software and delete it like that (which can be much quicker than using the magic wand tool if the parts you want to delete use a ton of different colors or tons of separate patches of color).

If you only have MS Paint, I'd recommend downloading Paint.NET. It's a lot more advanced than MS Paint, kind of like Photoshop, but it's completely free. It can seem a little tricky at first, but once you get the hang of the tools it has, it'll save you SO much time compared to using MS Paint.

And regardless of what you use, if you have any problems saving an image in a file format you want, you can always get the image how you want it on screen, hit the Print Screen key, paste that onto a blank canvas in MS Paint, Paint.NET, or whatever, crop out the rest of the screen image, and then save as a jpeg. Just be careful with file formats like jpeg which can introduce compression artifacts, giving the image fuzzy edges and such (which you really don't want if you're going to then import the image into something like KG Chart). If you want to keep the image perfect, use file formats like bmp or png.

[Siva]

Thank you for all your help and info. I was finally able to download paint.net and play with it for a while. I spent a couple of hours using the erase tool to get rid of all the colors and just leave an outline (which was frustrating and extremely boring), when I finally discovered the pencil sketch tool. It removed every color and left a very nice outline that I can now transfer onto fabric to embroider. Once I have started I will try to start a WIP thread.