Photoshop Image repair: To screen images for scanning

You may have encountered such a situation. You have a client, want to put a picture on their company's home page, but the customer can only find some pictures from their old sales atlas, the original advertising company that made the brochure has closed or no longer contact, from any other place can not find the original picture. Then you can tell your clients that you can make your trusty friend help solve this tricky problem, it's--adobe Photoshop.

So you get a brochure, and if you're lucky, it's not broken or suffering from other misfortunes, it's just hard to get good scanning quality.

Now we have a secret that allows you to easily get high-quality picture effects using scanners and Photoshop.

As far as I'm concerned, I always scan images at at least twice the required scan resolution, for example, if I want to use scanned images for print jobs, the print job usually requires a resolution of dpi (dots per inch), so I scan at the DPI resolution at the time of scanning. For more demanding situations, I usually scan at the resolution of the DPI. Of course, it depends on the quality of the scanner. Most scanners can simulate a higher resolution than the actual scan, but I'll tell you in this article that even a cheap scanner can get a pretty good scan image.

Photoshop Optimized scan image tips

As shown in Figure 1, this is a part of the cut from the original picture. Looks like the quality is really bad, how can such pictures be used for printing? And see how Photoshop can turn it into a high-quality picture that meets the needs of printing.

Figure 1

The following is a detailed procedure.

1. Scan the picture at a lower resolution, save it to your hard disk, and start Adobe Photoshop to open the saved picture in Photoshop. Or you can scan your pictures in Photoshop by selecting the menu command file | Import and selecting the scanner you want to use from the submenu.

2. Select the menu command "filter | Gaussian blur", set the value of the RADIUS in the dialog box, note that not greater than 1 pixels, or the final effect will look very vague. In most cases, 0.7 pixels would be more appropriate.

Figure 2

3. Change the image size. Sometimes we may need to repeat the 2nd, 3 steps, that is, blur first, then change the image size. If the width of the image is greater than 2000 pixels, try to reduce it to 1900, and then resample it using two cubic cubes (the default setting) when you change the size.

To resize an image you can use the menu command "image | image size", and then change the image size and select an appropriate interpolation algorithm in the dialog box shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

As shown in Figure 4, the results after the first adjustment.

Figure 4

As shown in Figure 5, this is the result of another repetition. It's unbelievable, but the quality is really getting better. Let's repeat the 2nd and 3 more steps to see what happens. Change the settings slightly as you repeat each step.

Figure 5

As shown in Figure 6, the result of repeating steps 2nd and 3 is repeated. It's hard to see the rough grid in the original image.

Figure 6

This is the end result. For better results, I usually use a slight adjustment to the brightness and contrast and levels of the image (using shortcut keys ctrl+l).