Well, now you've done it. You were just scribbling on the back of some ruled notebook paper, maybe with pencil and/or pen. Before you could stop yourself, you drew something that looks really nice... on eeeevil ruled notebook paper. When you scan it in, it'll have those dastardly stripes on it, and you might even be stuck carefully erasing each and every line in whatever art software you've got. Either that or it's forever marked as being a mere Sketch.

There is another option, though. This trick is for removing the ruled lines quickly and automatically, while still retaining the quality of the drawing. It ONLY works if the drawing itself is black and white (that is, you only did it with a normal pencil or black pen, and didn't color it in) and scanned in color. If you did it on paper that has dark gray or black lines, this also might not work for you. (That's why I carefully avoid notebook paper like that!)

I'm going to be explaining how to do this using Adobe Photoshop 5.0 LE... if you've got another version of Photoshop, it should be pretty much the same. If you're going to be using a completely different program, it's up to you to figure out how to achieve this effect; Hopefully my instructions will be helpful to you anyhow.

I'll be demonstrating this with an old ruled paper sketch of mine. I did it in pencil, so the whole thing looks a bit faint and blurry. The blue lines are there, as is the red margin. Luckily there weren't any binder-ring holes obscuring it, so that's one less thing to worry about- those wouldn't be solved by this trick.

It looks rather faint. I'll need better color contrast to do this trick. Go to:

Photoshop's menu > Image > Adjust > Brightness/Contrast.

Fiddle with the settings with Brightness/Contrast until the background is whiter, the colors and lines darker and clearer. You're trying to make it look more like the original than the way the scanner interpreted it.

That's much better!

For some reason, the pencil marks turned out looking more brown than gray-black. That's okay. It'll be fixed later.

We can get to the fun stuff with getting rid of the ruled lines now. Go to:

Photoshop's menu > Image > Adjust > Hue/Saturation.

See the dial for Lightness at the bottom of that? Select red, and drag Lightness all the way to the right. Now all the red in the picture has become white. That makes the red margin on the picture begin to fade out. Repeat this procedure with Magenta, so that the red margin vanishes entirely. If you haven't got a margin visible in your picture, skip that step.

You get rid of the ruled lines in much the same way. Drag the lightness dial to the right (white) for Cyan, Blue, and Green. You might not have to do all three of those; what you want to do is change as few of the settings as possible, since it may also fade the drawing!

If you drew this on yellow ruled notebook paper, do the same thing with yellow; it might not look as clean as on white paper when you're done, so you'll have to do a lot of touching-up by hand. And stop using evil yellow ruled paper; it's pointless stuff.

If the ruled lines are some other color, such as purple, just take whichever colors affect the ruled lines and move them to white. Leave any dials alone that don't affect the picture in a way you want it to.

If making the blue ruled lines fade out has also faded out your line drawing, choose a color which is NOT in the image, and drag its Lightness all the way to the left, so it gets darker and restores the line drawing with a tint of that color.

When you're done with that, it should look rather like this. Nice, isn't it? Good clean lines with no stripey ruled lines across it.

However, it's still tinted brown. Strange.

Easy to fix, though. If your line drawing has been tinged with some odd color or other during this, and you just want to make it be a black-and-white thing like it was originally, go to:

Photoshop's menu > Image > Mode > Grayscale.

There, all in gray.

Now all that's left is to erase, by hand, any smudgy gray marks. These may have been smudges from the pencil on the original, such as the one visible on the lower left of my example; or perhaps crinkles and creases were in the paper. This might even include the edges of the paper, just visible in the scan; or rips and tears, or binder-ring holes. You might want to zoom in to work on some of them, if it's delicate work and you don't want to be squinting to see what you're doing.

That's all.

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