[kman42]

I need some really basic photoshop technique help. I have a rather jagged black line on a white background that I want to smooth out as much as possible, basically by thickening the line. I have used the Magic Wand to select the line by first selecting the background and then inverting the selection. I have then been using the Edit-->Stroke... or Edit-->Fill... tools to try to clean up my line. The problem is that I basically always end up with some gray coloration around my line that is not satisfactory. All I really want to do is 'thicken' my selection with black by a pixel or two. I have tried just about every blend effect available, but I don't totally understand them and just wish I could turn off blending altogether and just add a pixel of black.

Here's my starting image:

[starman]

If you want to smooth it out, try creating a new layer and using the pen/path tool to trace over the points you want to make.

Mike

[Old Toad]

You may have tried this and it may not be what you're looking for but here goes.

1 - using the Magic Wand Tool and tolerance set to 10, click on the white background. Make sure all of the white pixels have been selected.
2 - Under Select menu click on Inverse. Now just the black line is selected.
3 - under Select menu go to Modify and select Smooth. You will then be given an opportunity to select the number of pixels to sample radius. I tried 2 and it fattened out the graph by a couple of pixels.

Hope this has been of some help. Good luck.

I'm using Photoshop 7.0 in OSX 10.3.2.

[MindFad]

How's that? Too thick? I'm sure there's a better way, or you can play with my parameters:

1. Wand select the white at 50 tolerance and inverse the selection. This is so you've got the line on a transparent layer without the white.

2. Contextual menu > new layer via copy. Duplicate your new layer. (You should have two copies.)

3. Select Menu > Modify > Expand. Expand it by 1 pixel.

4. Gaussian Blur both of your new layers by 1 pixel, then merge them.

5. Unsharp Mask the new layer with an amount of 80, radius of 40, and threshhold of 10.

Suppose you could fiddle with that process to make it less thick, but at least it's thicker like you wanted and anti-aliased to an extent.