I am too. Shank's post on YouTube brought me here.
I'm going to see if GIMP is any good for separately mapping the traces. If not, someone with some python knowledge could possibly try using OpenAI to make a bot that can automate it. It probably won't be ready in time for this project, but I bet it would be hugely beneficial for the modding community. The trouble would be finding enough training images, but it's not impossible.
UPDATE: GIMP seems to do the trick... Kind of... I won't be able to do it quickly if at all because my computer is a potato. My PC is using all of its 8 GB of ddr3 to work on this file. The file in GIMP says it's between 1.6 and 2.5 gigabytes and I'm not able to do anything useful with it until I cut the image into pieces. However, it appears to work, my PC is just lagging terribly. If you have a modern PC, feel free to try it. Benje, I don't know how far you got with those traces, but here's how to hopefully make it easier!
View attachment 21811
I'm going to break this down a lot because people are probably more used to Photoshop, and the similarites between the two make the differences very confusing. It's not hard, it's just different. (GIMP can be downloaded for free from
https://www.gimp.org/downloads/) All I did was....
1) make a massive blank image. Mine is 10199x11000
2) Load Top-Sanded.JPG as a new layer
3) Select all with CTRL+A or ⌘+A on a mac.
4) Choose the "Select by color" tool. By default, it's Shift+O
5) Use the select by color tool in "-" mode (*more info to come) and click and drag across any region of green. This gives the tool more sample shades of green to select, or in our case, subtract from our selection.
*In order to put the tool in "-" mode, you'll need to hold a certain key. For me it is Ctrl. I think this is the default, but don't know for sure. It should be Ctrl (or ⌘ on a mac), Shift, or Alt. Try holding any of them and look for the - next to your cursor. If none of them show the - then try clicking the image, and try steps 3-5 again.
7) This should give you something like the image I attached. From there, you can add to the selection if needed by holding Shift (or whatever shows a "+" next to the cursor) and subtract by holding Ctrl or whatever shows the "-". From there, use the bucket to color the copper traces! You may want to do this as a separate layer.
Good luck! You can do this! If you have any questions or need me to rephrase anything, let me know! Also, your video on your progress was great! I'm excited.
Another update:
Bad news, I tried with a partial image at a lower resolution and GIMP gave me mixed results. Sometimes it works great, other times it just fills all the traces with 1 color. Luckily you can just use Undo, but it appears to be more difficult than I thought. If you do try this, you'll want to go to the "Configure this tab" button >Tool options and then experiment with all of those settings for the "Select by color" tool as well as the bucket tool. You might have better luck with the higher resolution scans if your computer can handle it. It might also help if you do one last round of sanding so that all of the scratches are going in the same direction, but I also get it if you want to never look at sand paper or files again. But because GIMP is a community driven project, it might be worth reaching out to GIMP in order to ask about what settings you can change in order to get the fill tool to only fill a continuous selection, because the software is already doing the difficult just fine.