Make lineart look old/weathered?

[RjBeals]

Non-map piece of art i'm attempting. My question: I have lineart done with the black brush on a parchment style background. But the lineart is too... black. I want it to look weathered and less black. I've seen something similar in the Butcher/Baker map (see reference clip). I have tried masks, then using a grunge brush to mask speckled spots out, but it doesn't look good. Anyone have any tips on how to achieve this effect?

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[Hai-Etlik]

Well, I've been working on variations of how to do this sort of thing and, at least in Inkscape, have ended up a two pronged approach. Take the layer, and both blur it, and break it up by composing with high frequency noise (This is roughly a "mask" operation), then multiply both with the background.

In Inkscape, I assemble all that as a Filter Effect and apply it to the top level layer for all the "ink". It should be possible to replicate the steps in a raster editor though.

A slight displacement map can work well too.

[tilt]

take 1-3 copies of the layer, blur them with different settings, set the blendings to show the parchment through them. Play with opacity on the layers (incl the original) to find the right look.
You might also want to change the black to a dark brown to make it stand out less

[Ascension]

I do two different things to break up my lines.
Process1. Copy all lines into one layer, give a .5 to 1 pixel blur, make a mask for the lines, on the mask run the pixellate-crystallize filter at 3, click edit-fade and then scroll thru whatever looks goods at the time. This will take out chunks from the lines and, usually on lettering, I will then max out the contrast to make the edges sharp but leaving chunks chopped out here n there.

Process2. For The Butcher map my lines were all a dark brown, I had one of Coyotemax's parchments at the very bottom and very top of the layer stack. The variation of splotches on the parchment gives the faded-out look to areas of the map colors when you change the blend mode and/or reduce opacity. If you wanted to restrict the faded-out look to just the lines then you could use part of process1 to make a mask for just the lines and leave the underlying colors alone.

[Schwarzkreuz]

Here Comes my favourite Trick. And its easy and quick. (PS CS)
I have run over your example, as you can see, the background is not affected, only the colour of the Linework, you can even erase the colour change, by making the Texture you use B/W, so you dont have undwanted colours interferre.
I hope this could help a bit?

[RobA]

Other options in gimp/photoshop are to duplicate the layer and perform a spread filter followed by a blur, or two displaces based on a plasma map, each displace in opposite directions.

Then blend as tilt and Ascension stated.

-Rob A>

[jfrazierjr]

Other options in gimp/photoshop are to duplicate the layer and perform a spread filter followed by a blur, or two displaces based on a plasma map, each displace in opposite directions.

Then blend as tilt and Ascension stated.

-Rob A>

Sounds like you need to create another Gimp script... hmm... how about "oldify lines"

[RjBeals]

i had time to fiddle with this again. Still working, but thought it was coming out nice. all photoshop. it's looking like a painting, watercolor, which i like. I used brown lines also, dark brown, but used some black strokes overtop where it needed it. There's so much grunge going on, the line work didn't need to much effects.

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