Workflow for reprinting Old Maps

[jackhstephan]

Hey Everyone,

I'm quote new to Affinity Photo and I was wondering if anyone can help me out by recommending a workflow. I am fascinated by old maps and I'd love to pint some high quality scans for myself. My question is, what is the best workflow for removing the discoloration from the old paper in the background and just keeping the blacks and colors.

I've been tried selecting the sampled color and then deleting the background, but playing around with the tolerance still yields a pretty noisy result. Perhaps I should preprocess the colors so that they are easier to select and lift individually from the original photo? I will provide an example of an old map below. Thanks in advance for any help.

[Old Bruce]

I would use the Posterize Adjustment layer on this to give me some broad areas of one colour which I could then select with the selection tool and delete. EG the sea.

Use very low numbers of colours in the posterize adjustment (3-7) and work on a copy of the original scan. when you have a 'good' area to select use the Merge Visible item in the context menu when you right click on the layer in the layers panel. Now set the tolerance for the selection tool quite low, 2-5% and click on the sea a large chunk of it will be selected and now you can delete it, work around the sea clicking and deleting until all of it is gone. You now have a Sea which is white or clear and you can then move on to other areas. Some of the discolouration in the folds is going to be tricky, you may have to use the lasso.