Hi! Anyone have any suggestions for improving a scanned photocopy? It is mostly text, some graphics but definitely B/W. I need to include an image of a photocopy in a PowerPoint presentation but wish to improve its readability.

Essentially- is there a reverse Photocopy filter?

I am using Photoshop CS.


Thanks in advance!!

-steve

The graphics you can blur, levels adjustment to make it more black/white (the original jagged line should become a little smoother). The text you can recreate on a layer above the original, match font, Control-T for free transform, hold dorn the control key while grsb the corners to free resize text layer to match ...

Or if that is alot more work than you want just blur a little and levels adjustment, maybe dust and scratches. Just some ideas for you to try ... always multiple ways to do things.

It is kind of a guess, if want a more consise idea post the image, someone will answer.

Hope this helps,
Roger

Thanks for your advice Roger!

My copies are fairly clean so clean-up is not too bad. The problem I have is that the letterforms are eroded and I want to build them back up. I already OCR'd the text so that in Powerpoint I can have a "text balloon" zoom in displaying a 'quote' from the document which I will reproduce graphically with scanned text.

Levels helped that a bit by setting gamma to .10. I have not had success with the blur filters. I also tried selecting just the black and expanding the selection so I could fill it in with more black- got blobs.

This may be an exercise in can it be done?!? :oldman:

I have attached a small, pre-leveled sample of the image in case you want to play.

Thanks again!

-steve

I don't know any magic way ... I used Book Antigua font and free transform to match size. It is a lot of work to retype everything, but it would be more work to clean it up. If you wanted to keep an old look you could place the text in a layer above in darken mode, some of the rough edges would still be seen...

Roger

Roger- Thanks for your time on this. I have appreciated your ideas.

Doesn't seem like there a good, simple adjustment which can be made. The whole image will be hard to read on the screen of Powerpoint pres. but I will go over the title and few other items for emphasis.

I took a look at your site and love your photos! Nice job with the animals- I know they can be challenging to create.

-steve

Thanks Steve, I love photographing animals.

I remembered a technique for smoothing our graphics which I found in a Photoshop book ... don't remember which one. I tried it on your problem and it didn't really work - but it did smooth out the bumbies, so you might be able to use this in combination with other techniques - at least to improve it a little.

Risize the image small - so that the bumps become pixels, then resize larger to smooth out ...

hope some of this helps,
Roger