Cleaning scanned magazine pages

[Ofnuts]

If you need to process thousands of images, better have them almost perfect out of the scanner. That means fitting a dark background, but also trying to get the best scan possible out of the scanner, since you likely have some brightness/contrast settings in the scanner software.

PS: AFAIK Rich is a Geordie.

[MrNiceButDim]

The scanner does have settings but it's not very easy, at least not for me, to see what they will achieve. The preview window is very small and cannot be expanded. I have trouble enough understanding the effect of different settings in a big canvas environment, let alone this small one.

And then there's the question of pictures. The first example I showed you was text heavy, this one is picture heavy, and there are everything in between.

If all pages were text only it would be a different case but trying to improve the text while not disturbing the pictures is pretty hard if you can't mask the pics as you can once they have been scanned.

Scanner settings

Second example

[Ofnuts]

1) if that page is the other end of the spectrum, you can see that its histogram isn't that much different, even is there is less see-through text. So the curve is basically the same, I just curved it a bit upwards to have more levels in the dark areas. But as it is it could be applied with good results to your first picture.

   

2) Your scanner obviously has a built-in Curves tool. You should really experiment with it. Half an hour here can save you days later. Plus your scanner may have the possibility to work on more that 8 bits/channel.

[MrNiceButDim]

(09-04-2017, 06:11 AM)Ofnuts Wrote: 2) Your scanner obviously has a built-in Curves tool. You should really experiment with it. Half an hour here can save you days later. Plus your scanner may have the possibility to work on more that 8 bits/channel.

I just find it impossible to see what different settings does in the small preview window.

The black paper arrived and the first  test is quite promising. Here is the page 8 scan again without black paper on the left and with on the right.

ComparisonPage8GIMP.jpg

Now, I was a bit surprised because I thought the unwanted see-through print would come from page seven (the back of the sheet that page eight is printed on) but then my eyes fell on the area left and below the byline. I  could actually make out a few words which was strange as they should be backwards (or mirror-turned as we say in Swedish).

Looking at page six I did indeed see those words. So the strongest see-through print actually comes from not the same sheet but the one under. I'm sure this was obvious to you but to me it wasn't.

ComparisonPage8GIMPCenter.jpg

[Ofnuts]

So the black paper (and perhaps some scanner settings) seems to have fixed everything?

[MrNiceButDim]

(09-06-2017, 03:01 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: So the black paper (and perhaps some scanner settings) seems to have fixed everything?

It's early days yet and many different paper qualities and other circumstances but it does look promising. (I can't use the scanner settings, as I said the preview window is too small.)

Thank you so much for all the help I have received.

P.S. I will most likely be back (and pretty soon too).

[The ancient one]

(09-02-2017, 09:30 AM)rich2005 Wrote: If you can be bothered, the whole thing, 3 and a half minutes

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Absolutely brilliant video - fastest 3 minute video in my life and it taught me more than the last week of searching the web and watching video tutorials has on this subject.

Like MrNicebutDim I use an A3 scanner.  Unlike his, mine has an ADF which I do not use as I am scanning very brittle ww2 paper so I do have black card double side taped as my background to eliminate bleed through.  The difference that makes has saved many hours of grief.  Until now I have been using Irfanview but I am now learning GIMP.  I must admit that Irfanview is far faster and easier at some functions but as I learn the various shortcuts in GIMP I am sure it will become as fast.  Irfanview unfortunately only does about 5% of what GIMP does.

My scanner being a newer Epson it has the EpsonScan2 computer software and that allows easy preview and a reasonable level of colour and white balance adjustment so I can confirm that with most books spending 5 minutes on colour balance setup eliminates hours of post processing.