Affinity Photo: Removing the background

[Pyanepsion]

Hello everyone,

I have been given a drawing consisting of lines drawn with a black felt pen on a white sheet of paper.

How can I remove the background as cleanly as possible?

Here is a felt-tip image taken from an Artlabel video.

Thank you for your explanations.

[firstdefence]

 

• I'd use a HSL Adjustment filter to desaturate the image
  
• Use an Exposure Adjustment filter with a linear gradient to even out the dark left and light right.
  
• Use Merge Visible to get a resultant layer
  
• Use Filters > Colours > Erase White Paper
  

 

[Pyanepsion]

So, the menu Color/ Erase white paper is not the best method?

[firstdefence]

Depends what you want out of it, but that filter immediately will not remove the darker portions of the background on the left, Erase white paper is literal in so much as it has no control and requires a bright white to get good results, the left side is not white, it's grey, so you get this haze effect.

If you want to keep the hand in colour you can mask it out.

 

[Pyanepsion]

Thank you very much Firsdefence for this clarification.

[Pyanepsion]

I just tried adding a background colour, which I had not done before.

After the Exposure Adjustment filter:

1. Add a coloured rectangle in front.
2. Merge with the visible layers.
3. Colour/Delete the white paper.
4. Merge with the visible layers.

Is there anything easier?

[prophet]

For black and white art, I'm always a fan of using the art as it's own mask.

If you create a black pixel layer, you can Rasterize to Mask the art work, invert, and nest. An added Levels Adjustment set to Alpha will help even out the black and white (though some added brush work might help as well). And then a colored background completes the stack.

Extra advantage is that the black line art can be any color you want just by changing the fill color of the black layer.