skewing an image

[mufka]

I have photos of bound material that I need to flatten out. The images are skewed near the binding. The National Archives doesn't allow one to manhandle the books enough to get flat images. The pages are all text and my goal is to machine-recognize the text. The quality of the text is good, but I need to straighten out the lines. Can this be done with PSP X? Or Photoshop?

 

[harebrain]

The people who do this on a large scale (e.g. Google) use a saddle scanner or photograph the pages individually, simultaneously at 90 degree angles. Those methods eliminate the distortion caused by not being able to flatten out the binding.

Trying to de-curve your text in post-processing is going to be very difficult: each page will be distorted differently. In fact, each line of type will most likely be distorted slightly differently.

The aforementioned scanning techniques are proudly documented on the Web.

 

[algraff]

Depending on how uniformly the text is distorted, you might try using the rectangular selection tool to grab just the area of text that is distorted and adjust it with the raster deform tool. A little kludgy, but it might work.