Isolating scanned handwritten text on a document

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
August 22, 2017
5 replies
10443 views

I have some delicate documents that have handwritten text in pencil on notebook paper on them. I have scanned them and the pages have some marks and smudges on them, making the handwriting a little difficult to read.

I could rescan with different settings, but I risk smudging the pages more, and getting the scanner dirty, the handwriting was in pencil.

I would like to make the handwriting more visible/legible, and reduce the marks and smudging on the paper around and behind the handwriting.

I tried bumping up the contrast, and auto tone, while they both bring out the handwriting, they also bring out all the marks and smudges.

I am having to go through and scan pages like this and then toss the papers away, and just have all digital documents. But I wanted to be sure I can clean the scans up a bit before I toss the originals, in case I have to rescan, but I would like to avoid this. So I would like to know what I can do.

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M

missartistAuthor

Known Participant

wow, thank you everyone, for taking the time to show me this, I mainly wanted it so I can get the handwriting visible to read, above the smudges.

M

missartistAuthor

Known Participant

Here is a page as requested to see what I am describing, this is the original scanned, it was at 300 dpi. My problem is there is smudging on the writing around the bottom of the page, and up through the middle, and I would like to remove or reduce it, while making the writing more visible.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Here's about as much as can be done through channel and layer blending. The rest is down to manual clean-up.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Smudging is usually tan/brown, and more or less disappears in the red color channel.

So you can use that, and set it to Luminosity blend mode over the original.

Mylenium

Legend

Yolu will most likely need to play with duplicating the layers and merging them using blending modes, with different adjustments sandwiched inbetween each duplicate. Conversely, some channel math may be useful to adjust the contrast on the luminosity while leaving the color untouched. Impossible to tell specifics without actually seeing an example. This stuff simply takes experimentation.

Mylenium

davescm

Community Expert

Hi

Can you share a sample, make it part of the page if the documents are sensitive, so that we can directly see what you have to separate and can advise better.

Dave

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