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keithd40044941
Participant
December 27, 2016
Answered

cleaning up scanned vintage artwork

  • December 27, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 1612 views

I'm trying to improve the quality of a scanned pencil drawing from a vintage natural history book (printed in 1849!). I don't have the physical book, just two compressed scans of the particular page. One of the scans is higher-quality (greater detail) but someone added cross-hatches over the page at some point. There's also text bleed-through and a small tear in the paper. The other scan is from a "clean" copy of the book, but the scan itself isn't as crisp and has worse jpeg artifacts.

I can handle aligning the two images and am comfortable manually erasing the cross-hatching...but there must be some way to intelligently merge the detail from the first image with the "cleanliness" of the 2nd image, right? Ultimately I want to have this professionally printed at around 12x12 inches.

Thanks!

Here's a cropped comparison...

...and the full-scans (resized for the forum):

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer davescm

    As Mylenium said you are going to have to do a lot of work with the cloning tools to make this tidy for printing.

    However, you could use your blurred version along with the sharper version to get to a starting point by removing some of the unwanted details

    Align the two, with the blurred image at the bottom, go to layer styles and set blend if as below.

    Then add a curves layer to bring up the contrast and a black and white layer

    After that it is up to you and the cloning tool ........

    Dave

    2 replies

    davescm
    Community Expert
    davescmCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
    Community Expert
    December 28, 2016

    As Mylenium said you are going to have to do a lot of work with the cloning tools to make this tidy for printing.

    However, you could use your blurred version along with the sharper version to get to a starting point by removing some of the unwanted details

    Align the two, with the blurred image at the bottom, go to layer styles and set blend if as below.

    Then add a curves layer to bring up the contrast and a black and white layer

    After that it is up to you and the cloning tool ........

    Dave

    K
    keithd40044941Author
    Participant
    December 28, 2016

    Thanks for the help!

    I ended up using your technique, Dave. Worked great to get rid of the bulk of the unwanted marks. I masked the bird so the "first" image was used exclusively, and then cloned my way to perfection.

    It's too bad that Prisma (free phone app which emulates artwork styles using computer learning) doesn't support high resolution output. It's able to construct pleasing brush-strokes that to me, look better than the original artwork, but the output is even lower res than the input so when blown up to 12x12 it's very fuzzy.

    Mylenium
    Mylenium
    Legend
    December 28, 2016

    There's nothing to merge. I'm not sure what you hope to achieve by using the second, more compressed image in the first place. It doesn't do anything you couldn't achiecve with channel operations on the first image. It's just going to be a lot of work, either way, because the book page was scanned wrongly and if that's realyl the final size, is way too low resolution to allow for any errors. At that res it also wouldn't print very nicely regardless of how much cleaning up you do.

    Mylenium

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