Image help

[Gene Abbey]

I have a scan, from a printed brochure, that the client wants to reuse. No original available. A pattern pervades the entire background throughout and I need to remove, reduce or whatever to make this usable.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Gene

[Trevor Somers]

Clone tool and/or healing brush works wonders if know how to use properly!

[admin]

Do you have the printed piece?

Check your scanner software for "Descreening" functions. My Epson scanner has pretty good descreening.

SCAN it at a very high resolution.
Now, rotate it slightly, 1 to 2 degrees.
Apply a very slight gaussian blur

Reduce slightly. (15 to 20%)

Rotate it back, 3 to 4 degrees

reduce slightly (10 to 20%)

Sharpen, reduce again.

During the process, try the Median filter, or Dust and Scratches. Any filter that can blur that pattern. And you can control with layer mask where you want to remove filter and where filter stays.

This process will begin to remove the moire pattern caused by the printing dot pattern. This is not a science, but rather a method which may or may not work. Much depends on the nature of the color areas where the moire is most detectable. Trial and error.

See this rather ambitious series of training papers Photoshop Quick Fixes by UDEL.edu (http://www.udel.edu/cookbook/web/giftoot/quickfix.html)

(And... notice how this low life (http://www.scribd.com/doc/2571268/a-brief-photoshop) ripped off the above tutorial for his own greedy purposes! Don't you hate it when low-lifes rip off other people's stuff just to make a buck with ad links?)

Also: you must download this PDF Tutorial (http://www.lib.umd.edu/dcr/publications/DigitalImagingPrimer.pdf) for print production -- which addresses the moire problem.

At last resort... rebuild the piece using Trevor's suggestion above.

:cool: