Problem - rendering inconsistent line thicknesses as the same thickness throughout an illustration

@Trevor.Dennis said:

The outside is no problem, but I am unable to find an option that does not select the line thickness on the interior lines.

@davescm said

"It sounds like you are using the wrong tool. This type of illustration is bread and butter for Adobe Illustrator"

To expand on this, Illustrator has a couple of features, and paths can be copied back and forth between both applications.

• Scale Strokes can be on or off. When on, strokes are scales proportionally. When off, they retain their same width.
  
• To draw a path with a lot of anchor points to simulate Trevor's, I used the Pencil tool and changed the options to more accurate. When set to Smooth, the Pencil tool has very few anchor points and actually becomes useful.
  

   

• I then went to Object menu > Path > Simplify and saw my shape had 55 points. My original path is in green and my new path is in red so I can gauge how much I want to simplify without changing my shape very much. This the first time I've gone to 0% and it's done a decent job. I use Simplify after Image Trace, which usually leaves too many anchor points.
  

   

• I can give it a second pass, but I can see it's starting to change the shape. I'm down to 10 points here.
  

   

Jane

Hi

It sounds like you are using the wrong tool.  This type of illustration is bread and butter for Adobe Illustrator, which draws all lines and shapes as vectors, making them easy to edit and easy to keep consistent strokes.

Even at this stage, you may be able to take your work into Illustrator and use the Image Trace function to convert to vectors.

Dave

It took me a moment to catch on as I was assuming you were talking about stroked outlines.  Strokes, whether with shape layers or layer styles on raster layers keep the same thickness when transformed.  But you are talking about linework so yes they change thickness when transformed as with the two outlines bottom left.

How many of the layers are closed?  Those that are could be filled and a layer style stroke used to replace the linework, but this only works where the linework is a simple outline with no inner detail.  You might be able to make use of the trick of reducing Fill opacity to zero so just the layer style is visible.  It's all a guess without seeing an example of what you are talking about.

You can copy layer styles by Alt/Opt dragging to different layers.  I suspect what you would most like to happen would be a way of automatically overwriting the line work, and I can't even think of an easy way to do this one layer at a time, yet alone globally.

OK Try this.  I laid down the line below in one go making sure it overlapped so as to make it representitive. I then clicked on the line with the Content Aware Tracing tool.  I clicked once, and shift clicked twice more to add the entire line.  Do this a layer at a time, and drag each path to the new path icon to save it.

Bugger.  It didn't work.  You can see it selected just the outside of the line bottom left, but selected each side with the rest of the line, so stroking the path results in different line thickness depending on the original.  

The outside is no problem, but I am unable to find an option that does not select the line thickness on the interior lines.

@Chuck Uebele ? @davescm ?  I'd tag Michael Hoffman but I can't find his user name

I don't think so (without losing quality), you already know this now in hindsight – you shouldn't transform/scale them.

Perhaps a small blur and threshold rather than min/max... Good luck!

If I can understand you correctly then you must do manual work. Can you post screenshot with some examples what you need to do and how your page that needs changes looks like?