Possible help for textured originals?

[Ed_L]

I came up with a crazy idea that *might* have a little merit, although it hasn't been tested except for one photo. And I don't know if it's worth the trouble, so you can be the judge if you want to give it a try or not. I cropped an image that was on textured paper, and here's what I did:

Made a new document that contained a layer for each of the red, green and blue channels in the original. This was done via channel mixer @ momochrome.

The uppermost layer was the red layer, which I set at 50% opacity (but could be changed for best effect), and the blending mode was darken.

The bottom layer was the blue layer (channel) at 100% (normal).

The middle layer was the green layer (channel) set like the blue layer.

With the red layer active, I activated the move tool, and nudged the red layer down a couple of pixels for best effect.

Although I didn't do much with this, the red layer could have a layer mask to allow you to erase part of the blurriness in key places that might be caused by moving the layer down.

There might be some situations where this would work well, and others where it would not be practical.

There could also be other uses for making the three (RGB) layers. Sometimes there is better information in some places of the image in each channel. You could use the opacity of the layers, along with layer masks to get better B&W images than might be possible with other techniques.

Let me know if you think this could be a good technique to use on textured papers.

Ed

[Ed_L]

I should have added that I didn't try to clean anything up in the image. I just wanted to see if it might work.

Ed

[DJ Dubovsky]

The results are really pretty good. You may have stumbled on to something good here Ed. Have to give this a try.
DJ

[Ed_L]

It actually looked a little better before I sent it in. Even then it is probably not an end in itself, but it looks better than the original scan.

Ed