Need help fixing images of text (old docs) 1

[ppedersen1]

I am using Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. I have an old document from the 60's, which I scanned in but the text looks very pixel-ly and I need to increase the quality of the page.

I have tried darkening and lightning, etc., as well as changing contrast. But it is still too pixel-ly.

I found an option on the pull-down menus (Filter>Stylize>Diffuse>Anisotropic) which combines the pixels together and makes them look more like real text, however, it also adds a bit of an undesirable twist to the text. Any ideas of another feature that will do what I want with the text?

Thanks.

 

[dimoj]

First of all what sort of 'document' is it?

If it is a newspaper or magazine page, you will need to select 'descreen' during the scan to avoid the moire pattern (if your scanner has that option, if not, there are techniques you can use to help reduce the pattern but I don't want to go into that unless necessary).

If it is a letter or something of the sort that shouldn't matter...but what DPI did you scan the image? You will need to scan at least 300 DPI for a crisp image.

 

[duncdude]

The image (as dimoj points out) could be either continuous tone - i.e. photograph - or screened - made up of small dots. Anything that has been to a printing press or come out of any laser printer, etc. will have a screen on the images. This is easily seen on a computer monitor... simply view your image at 66.7% (trust me!) and you will not believe how awful a screened image looks. It will look pretty good at 100% but don't be fooled. This is due to the perfect make up of the dot pattern. It is created using an 'amplitude modulated' screening method which uses tiny dots with the centres exact distances away from each other. You can try despeckle but this only gets rid of a minimal amount. I tend to use gaussian blur when the images become more stubborn. Good luck!

Duncan

 

[ppedersen1]

Thanks. Despeckle definitely does not do the trick. However, the gaussian blur worked quite well, with a bit of contract/level changing, I was able to get a much better images than I currently had. I also tried sharpening it up just a bit afterwards, which got rid of a bit of the unnecessary shadow.

Best,
Philippe

 

[duncdude]

Cool!

Duncan