digitize text

[digitalis]

hello

my project is to take photos of the pages of a book with my digital camera and then perform OCR (optical character recognition) on the photos using ABBYY Finereader program, in order to convert the images to editable text

can you tell me please how can I
1) eliminate the shadows at the edges of the pages
2) eliminate the reflections from the light at the glossy paper of the pages
3) eliminate skew distortion (that is produced because the page curves or because the camera is placed at the center of the document and thus the text at edges is distorted)
4) increase contrast between black characters of the text and white background of the page and make white of the page, true white, and black of the characters, true black

thanks

[mozartdminor]

Also, I think it's safe to say that if you don't already know what you need to do to accomplish what you're asking, then you don't have the skill to use what we tell you.

[digitalis]

Originally Posted by Steve

How about taking a Photoshop course first instead of pulling an illegal copy of Photoshop off the net and then asking others how to use it...sigh

are you aware that you are on photoshop forum?
oh, and don't judge by yourself about illegal copies
besides, last time I saw, there were not any free photoshop courses with purchasing photoshop

Originally Posted by mozartdminor

Also, I think it's safe to say that if you don't already know what you need to do to accomplish what you're asking, then you don't have the skill to use what we tell you.

what kind of logic is this?
you are confused...

[mozartdminor]

Originally Posted by digitalis

1) eliminate the shadows at the edges of the pages
2) eliminate the reflections from the light at the glossy paper of the pages
3) eliminate skew distortion (that is produced because the page curves or because the camera is placed at the center of the document and thus the text at edges is distorted)
4) increase contrast between black characters of the text and white background of the page and make white of the page, true white, and black of the characters, true black

forgive me if I was a bit short in my earlier post. What I meant to convey is that if you don't have the familiarity to already know how to do these things, then you probably aren't familiar enough to be able to execute the instructions we give you–at least not with results to your liking.

but to give you the real answers (to the best of my knowledge)

1) use a combination of the clone stamp and the heal brush to pull unshaded areas of the page over the shaded areas. use the clone stamp for general color change, and the heal brush to blend.
2) again, you're going to have to clone and heal it out.
3) you'll want to duplicate the skewed text to it's own layer. I'd recommend either using the lasso, or the pen tool set to paths to make the selection then press ctrl+j (cmd+j on a mac) to promote the selection to a new layer. then on your new layer you'll need to play with edit->transform->skew to try to correct the text. If skew doesn't work, I'd say to experiment with the other transform options
4) I'd say Image->Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast to up the contrast, the image->adjustments->black & white to fully desaturate, followed by image->adjustments->posterize (set to 2) to try to just get two colors. It's going to probably be messy, so you'll need to clean it up with either the eraser or brush tool.

Forgive me if I came across as rude before, I should have been more diplomatic.

[tecktalk]

he is not asking about photoshopp.... he was talking about his.. AABB ^_^ ting tong programme.. which is never related to this forum....

[digitalis]

Originally Posted by tecktalk

he is not asking about photoshopp.... he was talking about his.. AABB ^_^ ting tong programme.. which is never related to this forum....

no
re-read