Lines, isolation, and maps. (some scary flash stuff too)

[Alex Levin]

Hey guys,

Absolutely new to Photoshop and this forum. I gave myself a project to do, and am now struggling to fulfill the requirements. I'll detail what I'm doing in a second. If anyone could point me in the direction of some guides that would work for my requirement I would be extremely appreciative!

So I have a .svg map of the USA that has county lines separation.
Found here: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/USA_Counties_with_names.svg

I have a fiber map of the USA that I scanned in from a drawing scanner. I'll attach it below. I can open and shade the .svg in Illustrator no problemo for my purposes (I'm shading it according to declared disaster severity across the USA.) When I'm done shading the .svg I want to be able to overlay only the fiber lines from the attached pdf onto it.

So basically, I'm trying to isolate the black lines running across the USA in the pdf for the purpose of being able to overlay it.

speedyshare.com/files/29624502/14193.pdf

What I eventually want to be able to make is some sort of flash animation where I can click a box and the fiber appears, unclick the box and it dissapears, click another box and the disaster shading appears.



So how do I go about isolating these lines in the pdf? I've got photoshop and illustrator.

Thanks in advance!

 

[$1r_M4x1mu$]

Hi Alex Levin

You can use many techniques for line extracting but using level and channels, will be the easiest, I found you a tut that you may find useful, Extract Lineart in 8 Simple Steps

 

[Alex Levin]

Thank you very much for the guide.

I having some trouble with the levels, for some reason whenever I change the levels they revert back to what they were before.

Not sure why... Could anyway tell me how to fix this or try to adjust the levels themselves on the .psd? I guess I'm trying to clean up the dark shading in Canada so that I can extract the fiber lines and be able to overlay them over another map of the USA.

Thanks.

View attachment cropped.psd

 

[ibclare]

It worked fine for me. I'm not sure what the problem is. You are clicking OK after you set the levels? Here's a screen shot of how I set them. If you just want it done for you, I have the finished psd, so let me know. One other thing you could try, make a separate layer for levels adjustment. Go to Layer>new adjustment layer>levels. You shouldn't really need the extra step though, but again, not sure why levels aren't sticking.

 

[ibclare]

BTW, I just tried it using the layer for levels and it doesn't work as well. The first method produces much cleaner lines.

And thank you Sir Maximus, that was a very handy little tutorial. I didn't know to ctl click rgb for selection (what I don't know about PS could fill a book and I am still learning many shortcuts I should already know).