Help to Remove Shadow and Blurriness After Scanning a Legal Paper Document

Report · Dec 04, 2018

Hi:

I have a problem that AdobeXI might help me solve when scanning a 27 page document. I am using the software provided with my HP8600 All-in-1 printer, working from the printer's panel. I think it is TWAIN compliant.

The document that I must scan is in portrait orientation and is stapled at the top edge. It being a legal document, I am not allowed to remove the staples. So, I must fold over each page after it is scanned on the flatbed platform; thus, the top edge becomes thicker as more and more pages are scanned and folded over the top edge of the page.

Two discrepancies occur after scanning the document:

1. the first several lines (at the top of the page) appear blurry. Will sharpen text during the scan be helpful?

2. the first several lines (at the top of the page) have a grey shadow. Will switching to a black&white scan be helpful?

I am hoping that the Adobe software can eliminate both of these problems, possibly via the scan presets adjustments. Any hints or suggestions would be appreciated very much. I do not have any experience using the Adobe presets dialogue; please point me to its location within AdobeXI.

Thank you for reading this. Hopefully, I have posted to the appropriate forum ?

VinceB.

Report · Dec 04, 2018

Hi Vince,

Whew, what an issue. You are correct that the staple problem is a big issue. Unfortunately Acrobat cannot help you with the blurry text, NOTHING can help with that, it's due to the fact that the page is out of the focus range of the scanner.

The only thing you can do for that is to do what's necessary to keep the whole page flat on the scanner bed. It will take some maneuvering but it should be possible. If this was a 400 page book you'd have the same problem with text near the spine of the book but almost no way to prevent that. What I'd suggest is after doing the first page, do not use the scanner's cover. Rather just leave the cover open and hold the page(s) down and against the scanner's edge by your hands. Leave the "done" pages to drift off to the side or what/wherever.

I do not know that scanner but I believe you mentioned that you were using the scanner's software: GREAT! I always prefer to use the scanner's software directly and not bother using the same thing through Acrobat. To me that's like using a stick to hold a key, I just want to hold the key directly, too many things can go wrong otherwise.

Most scanning software has different levels of scanning: from let the machine do everything to you having control on everything. I strongly suggest you look for the latter, it may be called Professional or something like that. The things you want to look for is some kind of Levels control: the right side is white, the left side in black and gray is in the middle: you want to slide the right side controls over to the left until the page doesn't look gray at all. You may need to move the middle slider over to the left as well a bit to make sure that the text is black.

Also look for selecting the page, some sort of cropping. This is just like any marquee setting and once you have it for the first page, you are good.

If you can, save the pages as TIF images. If you can only save them as JPGs, save them with the least amount of compression. Either way, the pages will be fairly large until you bring them into Acrobat where after text recognition the size of the final PDFs will be significantly smaller. So don't worry.

Have all of the scanned pages go into a single folder and let the scanning software self-number the pages for you. They might be something like "untitled.jpg," "untitled-1.jpg," etc.

When all is completed, go into Acrobat and select something like "Combine Files into a Single PDF." (Forgive me, I'm looking at Acrobat DC Pro and I do not remember exactly what it's called in Acrobat XI.) There will be an option there to select a folder and combine all of the images into a single PDF. Go do that.

Now, the area where there is the staple: When you open the PDF in Acrobat, look for Editing the PDF. When you do that, the text will probably be re-done so be a tad patient. But the area where the staple is will be considered a graphic. Once the page is ready, you can simply click on the staple and delete it using the Backspace or Delete key (Mac or PC in that order).

Finally, I cover some of these things in the following blog i wrote some time back:

Scanning Clean, Searchable PDFs

Let us know if any of this makes sense and helps you (or not)

Report · Dec 05, 2018

Hi Gary:

Thank you for your reply info, and blog article. I gave the blog a quick partial read through yesterday, and will study it more when time permits. The example given with scanning a the newspaper article is very informative, and resembles my situation very closely. I appreciate the points you made about the histogram in particular.

When I mentioned my using the HP8600 software, my point is that I did not use Adobe or Win10 scanning features when I scanned the 27 page document.

I do have a couple of questions:

If I use the Adobe presets adjustment features (found under Scan a paper document to PDF using a preset (Windows) at Scan documents to PDF, Adobe Acrobat , is that in effect adjusting the HP8600 presets, or should I search for info on using the HP8600 scanning presets? I am not too familiar with Adobe, and do not know if I use its presets adjustment procedure if it then expects me to do scanning at that time.
Am I correct to understand that the histogram is available only if I scan a document and save as jpeg file? Is the histogram available if I save the scanned pages as .TIF files?
In my situation with folding the top edge of each page over, I believe that I must preset for Black&White scanned pages only?

I can see myself re-doing the scan, which took most of an hour for me to do. If nothing else, an exercise in learning how to do this task more efficiently.

Thanks again.

Report · Dec 05, 2018

Hi Vincent,

To your last point: yes, consider this as an exercise for learning and to shorten subsequent scanning days. ;>)

To make sure that I'm being clear here, here are two photos of how to scan when you can't remove staples. Neither is best, it depends upon too many conditions. Also remember that you do not HAVE TO scan upright. You can always flip the page later on. Below I was just laying the paper on the top of my scanner as I was being lazy.

The benefit of the first one is that it helps get flat pages but prevents closing the lid. The latter lets you close the lid but limits how flat you can get the page. Try both.

Now, to your questions:

1) The problem with presets is that they tend to look at a page as a whole and average as a whole. Let me use photography as an example and how you have to be smarter than the computer within a camera. If you walk up to a steam engine and take a photo, the engine will end up a much lighter gray than it really is. That's because the camera will average out the photo and lighten up the black of the engine. To get a better image, you need to manually close down your aperture to get a better black in the engine.

It would be good to try using the presets to see how they look and how they work. Look for any differences between taking a scan of a page full of text versus a page of only a bit of text on the top of the page. If they have a preset of "document" (or something like that) do try that. Than, following the guidelines I mentioned in my block, try your own settings and see if you appreciate the differences. If you do not see anything that appeals to you one way or the other, do what' most efficient for you.

2) The histogram would be there if it's a JPG, PNG, or TIFF. That's an element of the image and has nothing to do with what kind of saving process you used or are using.

3) Excellent point: a black and white image is both 1/3rd the size of a color image. Color has red, blue, and green channels, whereas B&W only has 1 therefore 1/3 the data. If you do not need color, don't use it. In addition, and more importantly, if the paper has a slight color cast (very light blue, pink whatever), that would show up in a color scan and in the grand scheme of things is pretty unnecessary. However, that color will appear as a light grayish tint if you just scan away with no balance in the Histogram. I've not seen too much proper control of that with Presets because that IS part of the scanned image (but something you can easily remove in the Histogram).

Let me know if this properly answers your questions,