Wanted: Plugin to make thin lines thick

[Klaus]

I am looking for a filter that "fattens up" thin lines, but does not affect thick lines or the border of larger objects.
It should work like a dilation/erosion (or photoshops maximum/minimum filter) and enlarge dark areas, but with a selectable limit to the resulting size of the new dark area - or work only on objects "thin" objects.
As a written command i would like to say: "Set minimum width of all lines to 3 pixels"

[HaraldHeim]

How about programming such a filter yourself with FilterMeister (www.filtermeister.com) ?

[Andrew B.]

I have no idea if this is what you are asking for, but I developed a method for thickening lines after I converted a photo to a sketch. Here is the link:

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showth ... eadid=5852

Just scroll down to the message called "Intensify" and the section called "Thicken."

If you want to see the images you will have to join. But you can read the method without joining.

[Guest]

How about programming such a filter yourself with FilterMeister (www.filtermeister.com) ?

Well, i already made some filters with FilterMeister, so this could be a way to go. But first I wanted to know if a solution is already available.

Things like blurring and treshholding tend to add additional pixels to all object edges, not only to thin objects. I think that no simple filter based on convolution can do the job; it has to be something "better", maybe with object segmentation and classification (to sort out thick objects) before adding pixels.

In reply to Andrew: I am not into line art (or comics), but sometimes have to scale down bitmaps with technical drawings and must not lose thin lines (as measurement lines). I want to "fatten them up" before scaling without affecting other lines.

[Andrew B.]

Gad, I just reread your question and realized I was not even answering in the same State, let alone ballpark.

Well, I might as well risk making another bad suggestion. You could ask over in the sci.image.processing newsgroup to see if anyone has heard of such a process. It might not be in the form of a plugin, but there might be something.