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philb29378355
Participant
October 10, 2016
Question

Gray overlay

  • October 10, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 3085 views

I work for the Wisconsin State Journal. We subscribe to a service that archives past issues. We've found recently that many of these PDFs have a gray overlay, aren't as sharp as they used to be, and are giant files (21 MB versus 3 or 4 typically). I assume it has something to do with how they're scanned in, but is there a way, after the fact, that we can remove what appears to be a screen over the pages? When I rapidly re-size the files (Control+wheel), the gray disappears for half a second and I see clean black-and-white text, so it must be some sort of layer. We've tried working with the folks who scan the documents to see if the problem is being caused on their end, but in the meantime can we do something as the end users?

Here are two snips: The first shows how the pages used to look, and should look; the second shows the gray overlay.

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1 reply

Karl Heinz Kremer
Community Expert
Karl Heinz KremerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 10, 2016

This looks like the first image was scanned in monochrome mode (black and white pixels only), whereas the second image was scanned in grayscale mode (e.g. 256 different levels of gray from white to black). This requires a lot more data than a black&white scan. You can very likely enhance the scans in Acrobat Pro using the "Enhance Scan" feature, which can create smaller files, and may be able to get rid of the background.

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philb29378355Author
Participant
October 10, 2016

That's very helpful, Karl. So where do I find the "Enhance Scan" feature? I agree with Dov, that the problem is in the scanning. We're working with the folks who do that to see if we can get it straightened out. But in the meantime, anything I can do to fix the PDFs I have would be better than nothing.

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philb29378355Author
Participant
October 10, 2016

In Acrobat DC Pro, you can find it on the "Right Hand Pane", or on the Tools tab. If you don't see it right away, just type in "scan" into the tool search field.

Load the document into Acrobat, then bring up the tool and select Enhance>Scanned Document. You should now see a "Settings" button that allows you to modify the way the document gets processed. Select the "Filters" option to remove the background, and then use the "Adaptive Compression" option to get a smaller file.


Sorry: I should have said I'm using Adobe Acrobat X Pro. Am I in the wrong forum? Anyway, I can't find where the "enhance scan" feature is in Acrobat X Pro.

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