Improving readability of old letters

JM
Posted By
James McNangle
Feb 17, 2006
Views
358
Replies
1
Status
Closed
Further to my previous message, someone suggested I should try Image>Calculations. This offers a wide variety of different calculations which can be performed, including Addition and Subtraction, either of which could probably be used. I was able to devise a procedure using addition which cancelled out most of the bleed through, but although I could print out the resultant file, when I tried to save it the new file was totally black.

I noticed that the original files were shown as being (RBG), but when I combined them the result became (Alpha). I suspect this explains why I couldn’t save the files, but I have to confess that I have no idea of what it means. Eventually I discovered that if I specified that the result should be put in a new document I could save a usable version. However I then discovered that I could only save it as .psd or .raw, both of which give a very large file size. However if I saved it as .raw, closed it, and then opened it again, I could finally save it in any form I liked.

I would be very interested if anyone could cast any light on this strange behaviour.

I have posted a sample of what I managed to achieve, and a description of how I did it, on my web site at http://www.corybas.com/Albums/Experimental.htm.

In conclusion, I can significantly improve the appearance of the document, but (at least for this document) it does not materially improved the readability. This has been an interesting exercise, and has taught me a bit more about Photoshop, but the procedure is quite complicated, and the result is really not particularly useful.

James McNangle

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TN
Tom Nelson
Feb 20, 2006
I got pretty good results by selecting only the red channel, then converting to grayscale and using Image>Adjustments>Threshold to force high contrast.
Tom Nelson
Tom Nelson Photography

In article , James McNangle
wrote:

http://www.corybas.com/Albums/Experimental.htm.

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