Scanning documents.

[Keith Clements]

I have the task of scanning an important Jowett relic. So have spent 3 days figuring out the best way to do it.

My HP Photosmart scanner would not quite accommodate the size and because the edge of the bed was not flat it gave brown edges to the copy. These can be tidied up with a lot of work using the Adobe Photoshop healing brush and contrast image adjustment. Worse though was the Moire pattern on the images which is caused by interference between the screening dots of printed colour and the scanning pixels. This was much better on my older Epson scanner so I rescanned eventually choosing 1200dpi resolution. The Epson bed was also flat allowing the document to lay flat but there was still some edge clean up required. After the edge tidy up was done , I then used the Photoshop Filter, Noise, Median set at 3 pixels radius. This worked well and removed the Moire patterns. Each page of this 26 page doc is over 400MB in size but the resultant files should be good for printing.

The pages were also put through Image, Auto Tone and Auto Contrast adjustments to restore some of the faded colour and brighten the yellowing parchment.