Dimpled texture

[wishy]

Hello,

Before I could stop one of my relatives, they'd pulled a snap from the wallet and were pushing it in my hand. I took a quick look and thought it shouldn't be a problem. . .

Of course, I now see that the cracks and dots that I reckoned would be easy are as nothing compared to trying to remove the golf ball dimples - texture from the original coated print.

I've tried softening, blurring, upping the contrast in sections and even desaturating and hand colouring (which was the most successful) but I'm stumped. Any of you smart cookies know a good method or action for removing the nasty little dots ... I'm fast running out of hairs to pull.

I've attached a copy (I hope) to give you an idea of the problem.



wishy

[pstewart]

Originally posted by wishy
... trying to remove the golf ball dimples - texture from the original coated print... [/b]

Maybe you could fix it by re-scanning. I don't know what scanner you use, but my Umax has a few "descreen" settings to get rid of magazine dots and such. On these settings it scans more than once. Setting your scanner this way could help with the dots caused by texture. If not, try scanning it again with the photo turned 90 degrees, then setting one overlapping layer to 50% opacity. I have done this with those awful "linen textured" photos with some success to get rid of the "sparkles" left by scanning. Good luck.

Phyllis

[pstewart]

I took a shot at dedimplifying (how's that for a word?) your pic. In case you can't fix the dimpling by re-scanning, here is a way to make it less noticeable.

1. Dupe and do dust&scratches at 2 then blend with darken.
2. Dupe the normal layer underneath and set it at 50% opacity.
3. Move that layer, the middle one, down and over two pixels with the arrow keys.
4. Flatten and proceed to retouch it.

Now you have a slightly blurred picture, but you can deal with that. Sharpen the eyes and mouth etc. and generally just do what you'd do to fix the blurries. If it comes down to a choice, it sure beats the bumpies!

Hopefully it's a choice you won't have to make. Betcha there is info on the web with better ways to handle this common problem. But I'm too lazy to look.

Phyllis

[Stephen M]

I have had to deal with this more times than I would like. Here are the steps for both flatbed scanning and Photoshop correction.

Scan twice from two different angles - long then short edge so there is a 90 degree difference between the scans, or scan once then rotate and scan again 180 degrees different with the same scanner settings (auto toning off). The scans should be straight against the ruler edge of your scanner if possible.

Make both scans the same direction in Photoshop and then copy one to the other as a new layer. Align in difference mode and rotate the upper layer if required to fit the scans together. Crop down so there are no weird edges if the two scans do not overlap right.

Change layer blend mode from difference to darken - this will remove the white spots. To remove the black spots the layer would be set to lighten.

This technique works because the flatbed scanners wide directional lightsource amplifies the flaws in the surface of the original, so scanning from another direction and merging them together will 'cancel out' the unwanted pattern due to the different lighting.

You could also try the actions/brushes etc section of this site for my two Photoshop 5.x or higher actions - AutoScanSpotting and SmartDuster. A small article I wrote which goes into this with greater depth can be found here:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binar...gspotting.html

Then there are the ISO noise reduction actions for v6 or higher which can be used with good effect too:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binar...V_links.html#G

Regards,

Stephen Marsh.

[Doug Nelson]

Anything you do in an editing program is going to soften the image. It can be made to appear sharper, however (see Jak's tutorial for one way).

There are many possible ways to approach this. Here's yet another. For this one I simply converted to CMYK and used the minimum amount of Gaussian Blur on each individual channel to eliminate the pattern. Then I applied USM.

No idea why it works, but it seems to.

[thomasgeorge]

You could also try here:
http://www.aim-dtp.net/aim/techniques/index.htm

Look for the filter ( all of the ones here are free ) called Rank Replace ...this filter seems to do a very good job at removing textures, dust etc. I used the setting of 5 from the pull down menu, applied twice, duplicated layer, applied high pass filter set blending mode to soft light and flattened. Good luck...Tom

[wishy]

Hey folks,

Thanks for the feedback.

I've downloaded the suggested actions and have been trying out the scanning tips but I still don't seem to be able to get it right. In fact I still can't really achieve the results you've submitted

(There was also a good article on noise reduction on one of the pages I was directed to which involved eight separate scans and layers of varying opacity - this didn't cure my problem but did smooth out other artefacts)

Perhaps it's because I'm working with a much larger original than I uploaded? Since I have to resize for printing, am I better off scanning at high resolution and working on this scan before resizing, or working on the resized scan?

Thanks for all your ideas - I'll keep working on it and resist the temptation to stick a new texture over it to disguise the dimples...

wishy

[Stephen M]

Wishy, if you crop out a very small section at the high resoluton that includes both detail and non detial and light/dark tones - then a suitable correction method can be devised...if you are really lucky an action could be written to help. A low res image does not give the list the same problems you face, so it is no surprise that you are having more problems than others.

And yes, working high res and finally resampling a dupe down is the best approach to heavy restoration - as it can hide the retouching to some degree by smoothing things out in the averaging process of the resize.

Stephen Marsh.

[Rachel]

Another way you might want to try..

Go into each channel individually and apply the following:

Blur>Gaussian Blur (around 2.0 or so)
Noise>Median (around 1-2)
Sharpen>Unsharpen Mask (set to desired settings)

You might then have to unsharpen mask the entire rgb image after doing this to each channel.

I use the above method to get rid of moire patterns from images scanned in from books, newspapers or magazines and it works beautifully.

[dcarr]

I gave it one shot with Alien Skin Image Doctor (I'm starting to sound like a commericial) And here are the results. There are many tweaks in the program, but I just used the jpeg repair in default setting.
Debbie