Removing (tv) scan lines from an image

|Show| · 28 Jun 2006 at 22:21

Does anybody have any tips on removing scan lines from a photo which, for example has been taken of a TV image and then obviously has faint dark lines along the image when its brought up on a PC.
i'm just trying to get some images from my xbox of a few things, but obviously the quality is poor to say the least without some photoshop work.

Berserker · 28 Jun 2006 at 22:41

If it's just the usual one or two lines, couldn't you just use the clone tool? I know it's not ideal, but you can't reconstruct information that isn't there.

Mr. Brightside · 28 Jun 2006 at 22:45

Failing that could you get a video capture card (unless you alreay have one) and plug the X-Box into your PC? Then just do screen grabs/record then take screen shots.

|Show| · 28 Jun 2006 at 22:46

i'm afraid not...i've not tried the clone because it'd take litterally hours...and its just not worth it...heres a sample of what i've got -

this image on screen looks really good (not amazing as its not HD, but still it looks good!) and as you can see the lines aren't really very visable here...more just blur caused by the different shutter speed, but still, very hard to edit

unknowndomain · 28 Jun 2006 at 22:55

Ok well you could try going back from the screen then zooming in or just cropping it as I cant imagine you will need a very high resolution image, also just out of interest maby try the deinterlace tool, see if it does any thing.

MrWhippy · 28 Jun 2006 at 23:02

Berserker said:
...but you can't reconstruct information that isn't there.

that's not strictly true, you can do it "good enough to look at", with almost any basic interpolation scheme (although this does not increase the real total information content of the image / data set).

however under certain conditions, you can accurately estimate some of the data that is missing from the original image data set. i'm not talking about filling in the blanks with weighted averages (as above), but for such things as boundary estimation you can use methods such as Step Interpolation to estimate where boundaries (edges) are in the image with greater positional accuracy than displayed in the original image (thus gaining a real increase in the data content of the image - ie adding in higher frequency components).

though i'm not too sure how relevent any of this is to the OP's problem,
so i'll shut up now

M0KUJ1N · 28 Jun 2006 at 23:16

Hmm, Im having flashbacks to my Image Processing course- hit it with a FFT tbh.Seriously though, photoshop/GIMP should have some plugin to do this automagically for you.

MrWhippy · 28 Jun 2006 at 23:22

try a gaussian blur with a radius of around 1 (vary it a bit, you might find the optimum).

it's not perfect, but it's a significant improvement on what you started with.

|Show| · 28 Jun 2006 at 23:43

cheers for the tips, i'll take them into consideration...MS should just really release software for transfer to PC...avoiding all these problems!!!

that gaussian blur works really well thanks