Make a silk purse out of a sow's GIF?

[marlene]

Someone has sent me the worst logo file I have seen in a long time. It's a 72 dpi GIF, indexed color.

And the entire background (which is supposed to be white) is speckled.

What's the best way to get rid of the speckles -- make the background all white -- without degrading the image even more? I fiddled with it in Photoshop, but technique I tried made it worse.

mxh

[Franca]

Hard to know without seeing it - can you attach it here, or do you want to e-mail it to me? Not quite sure when I'll have a chance to look at it unless it gets here before I go to bed, but feel free to send it anyhow!

[marlene]

I'll e-mail the file. It's tiny -- less than 30K!

mxh

[Mike]

What's the best way to get rid of the speckles -- make the background all white -- without degrading the image even more? I fiddled with it in Photoshop, but technique I tried made it worse.

mxh

Maybe recreate it from scratch. What does it look like?

[LoisWakeman]

I can tell you for PSP, and assume PS can do the same. You can either do a flood fill of the background, probably using lightness match rather than colour match, setting the tolerance to a low level to start with, then upping it until all the speckles are removed, or use the colour replacer tool, and select one of the speckle colours at a time to remove (a double-click changes all occurences of the colour).

BTW, this is almost certainly a JPEG that was saved as a GIF - a really dumb way to make a sow's ear!

[Franca]

I think there are a number of different ways to approach this one, depending on the result you want to achieve. Just to follow up in case anyone's interested, here's how I tackled it without knowing exactly what the final use was to be:

I used a combination of the magic wand (at a couple of different tolerances - about 50% for the main background and about 60% for the oval in the center) and Select Similar to select the areas that needed cleaning up. I filled the background with white and the oval in area in the fleur de lis medallion with the palest shade of blue I could find in the design. Marlene simply reset the type which was, of course, the correct thing to do. (It wasn't even centered properly!) It really was quite a nasty piece of work, wasn't it?

[marlene]

Maybe recreate it from scratch. What does it look like?

It's a fleur de lis in an oval frame, with lots of scrolly stuff and twining branches and such. It would be impossible to recreate (unless I paid someone a couple hundred bucks).

It looks like an old piece of clip art, maybe from a Dover collection. If I had lots of time, I'd try to find the image, but Franca did a great job of despeckling the file, so I'm just gonna use that.

Apparently nobody at the organization has the original logo, just the crummy low-rez version.

That seems to happen a lot.

mxh

[marlene]

Franca bailed me out, so I probably won't spend any more time on this, but I will archive your method for future reference.

I'm sure I'll need to use it at some point!

I just cringe when someone sends me a logo or photo -- most of the time they are poor quality and/or low rez. When I do get a good file, I usually thank the sender so profusely they probably think I am crazy.

mxh

[Molly/CA]

Marlene --

This is probably a real amateur's way to deal with spleckled fleckled photos but what the hey! I'm a real amateur. Who finds herself dealing with a lot of photos like this --scans, actually, as you guessed.

Go into "replace color" and eyedropper a speckle and turn it white. (If the speckle colors are too close to the logo colors you might want to roughly select the logo first and invert--) Then use the plus eyedropper to get rid of some more.

You can also roughly select/invert the logo and use a giant-sized eraser, then clean up the little stuff. (My experience with trying to fill has been that there's always a "leak" in the drawing --though sometimes zooming way in and doing a quick scan for the leaks is about as fast as anything. If there aren't too many you can plug them pretty easily.

Sometimes using the magic wand on the speckle colors works pretty well --they're usually not all that close to the drawing colors.

[marlene]

Molly,

I'm saving all this information for the next time I get a crappy file. Which will probably be any day now. <g>

mxh

[Norman Hathaway]

i'm sloopier than everyone else-
i just add a layer then paint white on top of it, wiping out all the speckles.
this is lame and imperfect, but extremely fast.
as i used a 2nd layer, i can erase any overlaps or other mistakes i may have made.

[Norman Hathaway]

sloopy speller as well

[ElyseC]

sloopy speller as wellAh, but you're also too lovable to not forgive. <g>

I'm under a deadline and popped onto the forum to procrastinate, of course. I needed the giggle, so thanks for your sloopy spelling.

<chuckling on to the next unread thread...>