Change the outlines on my hand drawn mountains in GIMP the easiest way?

[ptrben]

Pencil has a tendency to do that when scanned because the graphite sits on top of the paper and doesn't fill in the grain the way pen does, and the scanner heightens the difference. It can help if you set your scanner to greyscale, 600 resolution, and turn the brightness down. Then in GIMP you can adjust the levels or curves (values/lighting/whatever it's called in GIMP) to get a higher quality outcome and then when you're happy with the lighting, re-size the image to 50% (resolution 300, which is a standard print resolution). Doing all that should make the grain appear less pronounced, if it doesn't nix it altogether (depends on your editing).

I did this in Photoshop by doing a fuzzy color selection to grab the white, inverting the selection, creating a new layer and giving it a mask with the selection, filling the layer with black and adjusting the mask boundary and contrast until it looked mostly filled in (more like what a pen would do). I don't know how you'd do it in Gimp.

mtns darkened.png

Wow, this will help me tremendously, thanks, +rep.

Just got to figure it out in GIMP now