A Little help with a scanned image and photoshop please

quackers · 12 Jun 2008 at 10:55

Hi all,

hoping someone give me a quick bit of help with photoshop, i dont use the program that often so i'm a bit of a noob

I've got a scanned page from a book that needs to be cleaned up if possible, it's got a lot of noise (is that what's it's called? Purple ish background) in the background. I've tried the noise filter and it doesnt seem to make much difference.

Anyone got any ideas/recommendations on what filters/tools i could use?

Ta all

adamph · 12 Jun 2008 at 10:56

It would be helpful if you could post the image up so we can see exactly what needs doing to it?

adam83 · 12 Jun 2008 at 10:59

To remove the purple try altering the color balance, found in 'image'>'Adjustments'>'Color Balance'

quackers · 12 Jun 2008 at 11:04

That's a fair point adamph, i cant post the full page as it's not my image to upload, but here is a bit of it

You can the iffy background colouring

quackers · 12 Jun 2008 at 11:06

Adam83, i've had a mess about with the colour balance but i cant see to get it looking right

Paul11 · 12 Jun 2008 at 11:19

select all the background and fill with white

james.miller · 12 Jun 2008 at 11:24

the noiseware pro plugin would sort that out no problem.

quackers · 12 Jun 2008 at 11:28

is that available for cs2, xp and free?

quackers · 12 Jun 2008 at 11:33

I've followed this simple article:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/75229/cleaning_scanned_images_in_photoshop.html

using the brightness and contrast it doesnt look too bad, what do you think about this?

Cuchulain · 12 Jun 2008 at 11:33

quackers said:
is that available for cs2, xp and free?

There's a time limited trial version afaik.

simisker · 12 Jun 2008 at 12:08

If the page contents are just greyscale, then you can help yourself tremendously before doing any tweaking by looking at the various individual channels [Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Lightness, a, b] and using the one with the least noise as a new greyscale document. You'll find your tweaking [if you even need to do any!] is considerably easier.

I've already checked - the Yellow channel's your best bet.

Of course, if it's a page with colour on it you can ignore all that

whitecrook · 12 Jun 2008 at 21:46

You need a 'despeckle' / 'noise removal' filter. But usually documents will be scanned grayscale, or monochrome, unless the colour is important becuase it usually doesn't add any value to the image.

A technique that can work in certain cases is this:
gaussian blur on the image, quite blurry - i.e enough to detroy the noise and make the text unreadable.

Threshold to black and white

Use the thresholded image as a mask on a copy of the original

Subtract the area out side the mask from the image.

Should remove most artifacts that were annihilated during the initial blur.