Remove background from complex line drawing.

Hi people,
please cut me a little slack as I'm a real newb. I need to know how to separate a complex line drawing from its background. I'm building a site for my father and he wants me to use some original artwork of his for the header. I need to mount it as a transparency. It's fine black art pen on white paper and I can't work out how to isolate the image. If it was a block of image then there are various tutorials I could use as guides. This, however, is another matter.

Loads of fine, open detail. Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Also, links to ant relevant video tutorials would be great.
Many thanks, Jon.

 

Bit of work there without a masking app like this http://www.topazlabs.com/remask/
What exactly do you need to extract?

Nigel

 

I'm going to take scrolled banner and type, sea, water, ships and funnels. I'll probably leave most of the smoke unless I can find a relatively painless method of extraction.

 

Without the the stuff at the top which I gather is smoke it may not be so bad. I will see if I can do it real fast after I eat something. Happy to help real fast.

Nigel

 

Superstar

 

I'm hitting the hay now Nigel (it's just gone 11 here) but I'll check in in the morning.
Thanks again, Jon.

 

Does anyone have any ideas about the extraction of this image? Some help would be greatly appreciated.

 

By Extracting, It may throw the other details
I think they have to be cropped one by one

 

Depending on pixel size, I might think that Illustrator can turn this into vector graphic using an live trace and then manually just cut all the blank fields away.
Otherwise try work with the Select Color Range tool. It might be able to differ between your white background and high contrast background. If not, try getting higher contrast between image itself and the background and then try again with the Color Range tool. You might have to do some manually selection for the minor details tho.

 

If this is how you need is send me PM.
I have the psd file without any bg... there are a couple of pixels left but i can remove them all. I can keep the white colour where it should be to, that would cost something more....

 

Just play with the Color Range selection and the threshold