How to make handwriting legible?

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
March 26, 2018
3 replies
2054 views

I have a scan of a handwritten note. What to do to make the writing darker and even while increasing the contrast to make the writing legible?

Thanks, -- Robert

This topic has been closed for replies.

D Fosse

Community Expert

I'm not sure that helps a whole lot. The problem is that this is scanned as bitmap - meaning pixels are already either full black or full white, but no gray to bring out. It looks like this:

If you blur it a bit, and expand the black pixels with the "Minimum"-filter, you get this. Not much better:

Darkening with "Multiply" will apparently work on screen zoom < 100% - but this is the old familiar screen scaling artifact. At 100% it has no effect, and it has no effect on the original image pixels.

R

RobertHD05Author

Participant

Thanks Fosse. The bitmap thing had me going for a while. Eventually I was able to create a 'Background" of the image and save it as a .jpg. Then I could work with it a little. How do I scan in anything other than bitmap? I have a an older 16 bit Epson scanner I hook up to my WinXP box with Photoshop CS5 then save it to my network and open it and work with it in CC. I would like to find a way to make all those gray pixels turn into solid black. I am having my friend try to find the originals so I can either scan them directly or shoot them with my camera on a stand. Thanks -- Robert