scanning & working with written text

[terrie]

A short time ago, KT posted questions about scanning written text. I had suggested that she scan in RGB mode and then use Photoshop's Channel Mixer to get the best image.

I have recently been working on collaging some old family photos as a gift for my niece and some of the photos either had writing on the front and/or the back.

One of them had writing that was barely legible--there's a "Pedro" there in the upper left hand corner:

http://tlbtlb.com/images/tlbpgimg/lists/pedrorig.jpg



Another had a lot of extraneous blobs of old ink and other odds and ends of useless stuff:

http://tlbtlb.com/images/tlbpgimg/lists/nanita.jpg


I had scanned them RGB at 600ppi/dpi at 150%. I used Channel Mixer with the monochrome option to get the best mix of channels to get the best visibility of the text. I cloned out the extraneous numbers and garbage and then added sepia toning via:

1. Image > Mode > Greyscale

2. Image > Mode > Duotone (using a custom duotone of Ink1=EB8B23, Ink2=000000)

3. Image > Mode > RGB

4. Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer with Saturation=40


This looked pretty good but I thought I might be able to make it better.

I used Magic Wand (Tolerance = 15, Contiguous checkmarked) to select as many of individual letters as I could and then when into Quick Mask and refined the mask (worked at 200% zoom).

With this nicely refined mask loaded, I did a ctrl-J (cmd-J) to place the selection on a new layer and then changed this new layer's blending mode to "Multiply" and here's the result:

"Pedro" is now visible--I used the entire image in my collage:

http://tlbtlb.com/images/tlbpgimg/lists/pedrofin.jpg


and then these two:

http://tlbtlb.com/images/tlbpgimg/lists/octoberfin.jpg



http://tlbtlb.com/images/tlbpgimg/lists/nanitafin.jpg




The first one of these I did using Magic Wand took me a bit of time but once I got the hang of it, the last two didn't take me more than about 20 minutes...

Terrie

[terrie]

Here's the final collage:

http://tlbtlb.com/images/tlbpgimg/lists/familyfin.jpg


The 2 photos in the upper left are my mother's maternal grandparents, the 2 on the far right are her parents--father above and then below, mother.

The photo below the maternal grandparents (on the lower left) is of my mother and father. The image below my mother's parents is my mother on the horse (the one of the left of the horse photo is my mother as a young nurse at Ft. Knox) and the center image is my mom with her brothers (such a wonderfully weird photograph!). The photo below that one is my sisters and myself (also a wonderfully odd photo).

The child to the right of to my mother's grandparents is my oldest sister (the mother of my niece) as are most of the other child photos--I figured since I was giving this to my niece that I wanted to work in photos of her mother. The photo to the right of my sister (to the left of my mother's parents) is my parents with my two older sisters and the photo was probably taken in Ecuador.

Terrie

[Candy Jens]

Terrie, you could make a living doing this for genealogists! Beautiful job of reclaiming data!

Candy

[terrie]

candy: Terrie, you could make a living doing this for genealogists! Beautiful job of reclaiming data!Thanks...I just reload the final collage as it was a bit bigger than I thought...

I had worked with these photos a number of years ago and thought I'd given my niece a copy but I hadn't. I had been wanting to rework the photos because my skills have improved and there are new tools out so I started all over again rescanning and reworking everything...

I'm rather pleased how the collage has turned out...

Terrie

[ktinkel]

Here's the final collage …That is gorgeous. Good work.

I loved the handwriting. Wonder if anyone will want to display our handwriting in the future — probably not. We’re all forgetting how to write.

And thanks for the lesson.

[terrie]

kt: I loved the handwriting. Wonder if anyone will want to display our handwriting in the future — probably not. We’re all forgetting how to write. I was thinking about that as I was playing with this stuff...


>>And thanks for the lesson.

You're welcome...hope this gave you some ideas for your own stuff...I'd love to see examples of what you were working with...

I'm going to put up a page soon with all of the photos--before and after--and a larger version of the final collage--hope to get to that in the next day or two. The healing brush made image clean-up soooo much easier as you keep the important detail rather than losing it as you can easily do with cloning...


Terrie

[Franca]

Wow - that's just amazing, Terrie! I agree with Candy - there's a market for that kind of thing out there if you could just find it. You did a really beautiful job and I think anyone would be pleased to have something like that done from their old photos.

[terrie]

franca: Wow - that's just amazing, Terrie!Thank you...I'm very pleased how it's turned out...I'll let you know when I get my web page up...

Terrie

[Mike]

That's superb. You've inspired me to dig out some of our old photos. Not sure I'll be able to do such a brilliant job, though.

[terrie]

mike: That's superb. You've inspired me to dig out some of our old photos. Not sure I'll be able to do such a brilliant job, though.Thank you...I had a lot of fun with it...I'm really glad I rescanned everything and started fresh--thank goodness for the healing brush!--and I'm quite pleased how it's turned out...

Terrie