I have a pretty high resolution map of Manhattan in 1884 (screenshot below). The bones are good and it's what I need for a research project, but I'm finding it next to impossible to clean it up to the point where I can start. Ideally I want to get rid of everything but the gridwork of the streets. I can desaturate it and play with curves and levels, etc., but while I can clean up a lot of it, I'm finding it pretty much impossible to isolate the street grid. I already have 500+ text layers for street and avenue names. I'm hoping there's some way to do this that doesn't involve me setting up a new layer and tracing the whole island, block for block.
I'm using CS6 on a mac.
I'm fairly comfortable with photoshop; I can work with layers and masks, etc., but this is beyond my technical skills. I'm wondering:
1. Is this doable at all?
2. Am I missing something obvious?
3. Should I start over again with Illustrator?
I'm not very familiar with Illustrator, which is why I started with Photoshop. However, this is not anywhere near my area of expertise and so I would be thankful for any info and suggestions.
