Cleaning up stained B&W text documents?

"AES/newspost" wrote in message

Novice user seeking advice:

Have several letter-size b&w documents with printed text (9 point or 10 point font size, I’d guess) plus a few symbols (arrows and stuff), on stained or water-marked paper, that I’ve scanned in using Grayscale mode at 300 dpi (approx 3.5 MB/page).

Would like to clean up the background a bit (push the stains down a ways toward white), keep text reasonably sharp on screen or when printed on hp LaserJet laser printer, and reduce file size (and printing time).
What tools and steps should I pursue in Photoshop Elements? Inparticular, can I end up with a b&w rather than grayscale file and still keep reasonable sharpness on the text? JPEG or Gif (or PNG) for final file type?

Any advice (and email copy of reply) appreciated — thanks.

If all they are is text, you can play around with the adjustments for Levels and Brightness/Contrast under Image > Adjust.
I’ve gotten great results just by playing with these two. Regarding the stains. you may want to make a selection around them using a Marquee or Lasso tool and then tweak just that portion without affecting the rest of the document.
Threshold is another tool under the same menu that may come in handy, depending on the resolution and complexity of the document.

Note: I’m using Photoshop but I think Elements has the same location for these functions.

Peadge 🙂

AES/newspost writes:

Have several letter-size b&w documents with printed text (9 point or 10 point font size, I’d guess) plus a few symbols (arrows and stuff), on stained or water-marked paper, that I’ve scanned in using Grayscale mode at 300 dpi (approx 3.5 MB/page).

Can you re-scan in color mode?

Assuming your stains are not black/gray, the colors will give Photoshop something it can autmatically remove. The "replace color" facility often works in situations like this.

— David

"AES/newspost" wrote in message

Novice user seeking advice:

Have several letter-size b&w documents with printed text (9 point or 10 point font size, I’d guess) plus a few symbols (arrows and stuff), on stained or water-marked paper, that I’ve scanned in using Grayscale mode at 300 dpi (approx 3.5 MB/page).

It’s unfortunate that you scanned in B&2 (Greyscale). Can you do them again in RBG? That way you can select-out colors using several techniques and at the end, save them as Greyscale if that’s what you want in the final output.

AES/newspost wrote:

Novice user seeking advice:

Have several letter-size b&w documents with printed text (9 point or 10 point font size, I’d guess) plus a few symbols (arrows and stuff), on stained or water-marked paper, that I’ve scanned in using Grayscale mode at 300 dpi (approx 3.5 MB/page).

Would like to clean up the background a bit (push the stains down a ways toward white), keep text reasonably sharp on screen or when printed on hp LaserJet laser printer, and reduce file size (and printing time).
What tools and steps should I pursue in Photoshop Elements? Inparticular, can I end up with a b&w rather than grayscale file and still keep reasonable sharpness on the text? JPEG or Gif (or PNG) for final file type?

Rescan in RGB and look at your channels, with a bit of luck your stains will be visible only in one or two of them.
Delete them and change your document to B&W

Stephan

In article ,
AES/newspost wrote:

Would like to clean up the background a bit (push the stains down a ways toward white), keep text reasonably sharp on screen or when printed on hp LaserJet laser printer, and reduce file size (and printing time).

I’ve read somewhere these instructions for line-art scanning:

– Scan at the maximum optical resolution in grayscale mode (RGB may be a good choice if there are colored stains).

– If practical (i.e. the resolution isn’t already too high for the computer to conveniently handle), then do a 2x bicubic-smoother upsampling (this seems to be the only case when that source recommended upsampling).

– Crop and straighten the image.

– Convert to grayscale. In this step you can try to reduce the colored stains.

– Unsharp Mask 500/1/5 once or twice. Skip this if it makes the image too "messy".

– Threshold (2-55-) so it looks OK.

– Convert the image to a bitmap with 50% threshold, with a suitable dpi (300-600-1200 dpi depending on the final output resolution).

– Retouch off any artifacts, if needed.

– Save as compressed TIF or GIF.

Peadge wrote:

"AES/newspost" wrote in message

Novice user seeking advice:

Have several letter-size b&w documents with printed text (9 point or 10 point font size, I’d guess) plus a few symbols (arrows and stuff), on stained or water-marked paper, that I’ve scanned in using Grayscale mode at 300 dpi (approx 3.5 MB/page).

Would like to clean up the background a bit (push the stains down a ways toward white), keep text reasonably sharp on screen or when printed on hp LaserJet laser printer, and reduce file size (and printing time).
What tools and steps should I pursue in Photoshop Elements? Inparticular, can I end up with a b&w rather than grayscale file and still keep reasonable sharpness on the text? JPEG or Gif (or PNG) for final file type?

Any advice (and email copy of reply) appreciated — thanks.

If all they are is text, you can play around with the adjustments for Levels and Brightness/Contrast under Image > Adjust.

I’d use Levels in stead of Brightness/Contrast, because this will give you much more controle over the process. But it’s probably more time consuming.
And I’m sure some of the staines just have to be removed by some old fashioned cloning.

"V1nc3nt" wrote in message

I’d use Levels in stead of Brightness/Contrast, because this will give you much more controle over the process. But it’s probably more time consuming.
And I’m sure some of the staines just have to be removed by some old fashioned cloning.

I actually like some of the other posts suggesting rescanning in RGB. I originally suggested using a combination of Levels and Brightness/Contrast. I would probably adjust Levels first, using the grayscale scanned image, but Brightness/Contrast may still come in handy for additional tweaking. A cool thing about Photoshop is that multiple paths and techniques can achieve virtually the same end result.

Have a Happy New Year!

Peadge 🙂

Peadge wrote:

"V1nc3nt" wrote in message

I’d use Levels in stead of Brightness/Contrast, because this will give you much more controle over the process. But it’s probably more time consuming.
And I’m sure some of the staines just have to be removed by some old fashioned cloning.

I actually like some of the other posts suggesting rescanning in RGB. I originally suggested using a combination of Levels and Brightness/Contrast.

You’re totally right. Sorry, I just read it too fast I guess.

(snip)

A cool
thing about Photoshop is that multiple paths and techniques can achieve virtually the same end result.

Photoshop is cool. Period. 8)

Have a Happy New Year!

You have a good one too, but I’m afaid well meet again before this one’s over. 🙂