CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

OK, this should be really simple, but I'm not in the mood to spend my life trying out every tool/filter/script to figure this out:

I have an RBG image in the making. White background and a basically black line drawing (from a scan). I stripped the scan off the background layer and put it in it's own layer (thank's to Mave's tutorial). However, I don't want black lines. I want them another color.

I tried converting all the black to a selection and stroking the selection with a single pixel path, but that's giving me really messy results. So what's the method for simply changing the color of a selected entity?

I might tackle this by choosing the layer with the line drawing, going to the Tools menu > Color Tools > Colorize. If you haven't made a selection, the entire layer will be colored, but you can kind of preserve the different shades.

You could also use the "select by color" tool and use a bucket fill, although the colorize method would probably be simpler.

Hmm... I usually use the Hue tool to replace one color with another. I've never played with it for a b/w image, though.

This took a while to respond to, since I had to test all these:

Bucket fill: Well, it changed the color, but oddly filled sections of the scan that clearly were not selected. Apparently the moving selection boundary isn't perfect. I was able, mostly, to clean up the stray marks with an inverted selection and background fill. I think the problems here are a poor scan with lots of not-so-visible stray marks. I had to set the Threshold (for color selection) really high to get all the desired lines (don't look at me, I would have inked it first. I got this scan from a CAA contest), so I got lots of noise, too.

Just using the Hue/Saturation tool would make some minor changes, but since this tool does not include the RGB sliders also, I couldn't get grey to turn into blue.

Colorize was neat and mostly worked, also the same problems appeared with stray sections as in the bucket fill above. Fortunately, these things have previews.

Thanks for the tips. I think if I ever work with a drawing like this again, I will print it out, ink it, then scan it again at a low threshold. That will make all of this lots simpler.

Ironically, that's the best way to do OCR, too.