Remove gray shadows and preserve handwriting

[Magixo]

Hello everybody,

what is the easiest way to remove gray shadows from my picture and to preserve the handwriting at the same time? I have a lot of pictures like this so I need to use your procedure in batch.

Thanks a lot,
Magixo

 

[ibclare]

Hi Magixo, welcome to the forum.

I don't do this kind of thing, so someone may have better ideas. What I would do is use the blend if options. First however, you should select the varying degrees of pale grey handwriting and copy them to separate layers, ctl/cmd + J.

Then go down to bottom of layer column, click the fx and choose blending options. See the sliders. The top row is for this layer. Choose the white slider on the right and slide it inwards. If need be split the slider in half by holding down the alt/opt key and clicking on the left half. Experiment with the results doing it one way or the other.

You will likely have to make copies of each layer and set the top one or two to multiply. Then you will need to do some cleanup with the eraser. Here is what I did. Didn't take too long, but you are not going to fly through this in just one or two steps (unless like I said there's a PS magician who knows a good trick and there might well be).

OTOH, here is a tutorial for lineart selection. I don't know which might be easier but you could try both and see which you like better.
http://krysjez.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/extract-lineart-in-8-simple-steps/

 

[Vafann]

I have been doing this quite a bit lately, scanning in handrawn sketches and things, and the levels slider is really quick and does a good job cleaning them up.

 

[Hoogle]

Well Look who it is

Welcome Back Vafann

 

[Vafann]

Well thank you Hoogle dear it´s nice to be back.

 

[Magixo]

Hello, thanks for trying to help. I do not know what to do next once I have choose blending options from the the layer column. Here's the dialogue box I get:



Thanks,
Magixo

 

[Vafann]

here is a tutorial that should be helpful

http://www.gamersdigart.com/features/53-tutorial

 

[Vafann]

Oh, but it depends.. I usually just use the levels slider to the left to make the lines darker, and the right one to make the background whiter, it´s usually enough for me, but maybe you need to do the whole thing.

 

[ibclare]

The issue with this image, however, is that there are levels of very fine grey that will disappear and so the document needs to be made into selection layers or you lose pieces of it.

Changing levels is definitely another way to do it, but I think you will still need to make separate layers of the different ranges of grey. This tutorial that I listed earlier uses levels adjustment: http://krysjez.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/extract-lineart-in-8-simple-steps/.