How To Touch-Up a Scanned Image Options

[chrishawke]

I thought I should just post this on the forums itself, since it can be used for future references. This is a small tutorial I made for LukewarmHoliday on how to fix up scanned images, chrishawke-style.

Hey, about this:

http://lacrimacastle.net/forum/index.php?s...indpost&p=72853

Does this mean you'll do some of the scans?

If you can tell me how to do it

Okay, first, we will need some kind of image editing program like GIMP or Photoshop. I use GIMP personally, because it's free, so I'll write on how to touch up Dusty's and cases's scans using GIMP.

Let's start with the scan you pointed out, PAGE 68:
http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/9676/page68.jpg

Click on the numbers in parenthesis you see in this post from here on out. They're pictures to show you stuff.
Straightening out the scan
Open it with GIMP and zoom in at 100%. At this point we'll want to straighten out the scan, so we will use a small line of text as a reference to turn the image. Use "BOSSES" for this one. Pick a tool like the Free Select (Lasso) Tool I've selected (1), click on one end under BOSSES, hold Control and click on the other end to make a horizontal line (2). You can see how badly the the image is tilted, so now we will use GIMP's Free Transform (3) to straighten it up. For this scan, use the values I choose (4), or something similar to it, and hit Rotate. If you want to check to see if the image is straight, do the lasso thing again (5).


Cropping the scan
Now that we're done getting it straight, we will crop the image so that cases's scanner or some other thing won't be visible. Use the Rectangle Select Tool (6), and try to select as much of the scan as you can, but omit the parts that have been cut off. I know, it sucks, but we'll have to make do with what we have. Select to the best of your abilities. When you're done, hit Crop to Selection (7) under Image and it's done.


Touching up the scan
What's wrong with most scanners is that they either scan them too light or too dark and create some ugly scan lines/grain when scanning them in high DPI. Here, we will do some minor color correction and purge as much scan lines/grain as possible.

Let's zoom in to our girl here (8). Then go to Filter > Blur > Selective Gaussian Blur (9) and use the values I chose (10). Hit Selective Gaussian Blur again, but use different values this time (11). This is to smooth out some more of the grain that the first one didn't take care of. It should look much better now, but the Blur apparently made the image a bit flat as well. So now we will use the Unsharp Mask filter (12) to help get the image some shine again. Once again, use the values I chose (13) or something similar to it.

Now that we're done with that, we're ready to do some minor color correction. Find Curves under the Colors tab, and you'll get some graph with a line. Changing these lines will affect the image greatly, and we only want to get its color back, so go along with my line (14).

Now, find Brightness-Contrast under Colors, and change the Contrast to 5-10 to give it some color (15). And we're done!

Not really.


Using the Clone tool to get rid of white specks

Oh, those little ugly white specks can just ruin an image. Take a look at an area in the top right corner around BOSSES and you can see three little white spots (16). Here, we will use the Clone tool to sample a spot and an area and use that to fill in the white spots, making it look like as if it never existed. Pick the Clone tool (if you don't know where it is, hover your mouse over the tools and it'll tell you the name of the tools. The Clone tool looks like a joystick pad or a stamp) and Control click and area next to the white spot. Use the keys [ or ] to decrease or increase the area of your Clone sample. Then stamp over the white spot with about one or two clicks, and there should be no more white spot there. Then go ALL over the image and take out obvious white spots as much as you can.

NOW you're finally done.

Here is the final product that I forgot to link him:
http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a67/Monta...ans/page068.jpg

[DustyHaru]

Helpful, thanks

[aerozero]

Awesome thread

[Dr Strum]

This brings up a great point.
There are lots of scans we need cleaned so we can put them on the site.

[chrishawke]

HOLY CRAP

Whenever I have time to burn after Tome of Lost Souls, I'll start working on a few of those too.

[LukewarmHoliday]

You can just drag down a ruler guide instead of using the lasso

[chrishawke]

That too. I'm just too used to doing it with the lasso tool. I even call it a lasso tool.

[jcdietz03]

HELP! I'm a complete idiot (okay that is not something anyone can help with really).

How do I upload completed work for someone else to view? I tried MediaFire but someone was having download problems with them. I tried Photobucket but there is a resolution limit (cannot be more than 1024 pixels tall). HELP!

More (dumb) questions:
Does Sturm want PNGs or JPEGs?
chrishawke: Will you please go over real quick how to export something to JPEG?

This post has been edited by jcdietz03: Jun 28 2009, 04:31 AM

[chrishawke]

Try using Fileden or Imageshack.

[jcdietz03]

This is late. Sorry.

Apparently it's possible to process a huge batch of images (such as the scans you cleaned) using built-in batch processing. It's built in to both GIMP and Photoshop. I hear the photoshop batch processing is easier to use, but I've never used photoshop.

chrishawke, do you know how to use batch processing in GIMP?

I hear a good filter to use for denoising is G'Mic.
How to install: You need to take the files you download from there and put them in your GIMP plug-in directory which is under "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data" in Windows. There are a ton of filters in there. I have no idea what they all do. I used the anisotropic smoothing filter for denoising.

It takes a long time to run that filter, so it would be good if you could run it using batch processing while you do something else.

Another cool related thing I found is how to debind your artbook (youtube).

[chrishawke]

Thing is, I use OSX, and I can't use command line for shit (OSX's GIMP requires me to build and compile plug-ins like G'Mic from scratch). Plus, I installed a prebuilt version of GIMP from god knows where anyway.

As for batch processing, I've read that GIMP has something called Script-Fu, but that stuff looks complicated. Again, I'm pretty bad at the command line.

Also, didn't see your edit a few posts above until you posted. You can export images by going to File > Save As... and manually changing the file extension to .JPEG.