[rockmonkey1973]

Ok

I am in the fairly long process of scanning and digitizing all my climbing guides because for whatever reason the powers that be have decided not to release digital copies.

So anyway i have bought myself a book scanner (which is fast and doing a really great job so far). I have scanned a couple of books up to now but some of the pages have writing on that i want to remove.

At the moment i am either using the healing brush tool or the rectangular marque tool and the paint bucket.

Both of these methods are fairly ok because when i am zoomed in at 1200 per cent the accuracy is quite remarkable and i am able to remove virtually every trace of drawn ink from the page even if that ink went through the words on the page.

it isnt perfect though and the healing brush tool can smudge and the paint bucket even though i have selected white leaves a slight (and i mean very slight) outline of where it has been. you actually cant see this when the image is converted into a pdf but you can in the tiff images when zoomed slightly.

So lets say the results are pleasing but aside from the slight problems above i am finding it is also quite time consuming. if i wasnt so anal i could probably skip this part but i am unfortunately the president of analsville when it comes to this sort of stuff.

so i was wondering if there was maybe a quicker, easier or better method for doing this.

i was also wondering you know when you choose which colour goes in the bucket and the colour is assigned 3 numbers (the colour palette???) what is the exact number for plain white. i think i may be selecting some sort of slight off white creamy colour hence the slight shading.

also what is the easiest method for drawing a simple straight line? lets say i have borders around a picture but the border is a simple maybe 3mm width black line and one side isnt showing properly so i wanted to draw it in.

or alternatively the easiest way to make a complete square or rectangle border of say 5mm width.

anyways if anyone can help a bumbler (and i do mean i am a novice) in photoshop elements that would be great

[EndlessWaves]

Originally Posted by rockmonkey1973

i was also wondering you know when you choose which colour goes in the bucket and the colour is assigned 3 numbers (the colour palette???) what is the exact number for plain white. i think i may be selecting some sort of slight off white creamy colour hence the slight shading.

0,0,0 for while, 255,255,255 for black.

Chances are the problem is the other way round though, the book scanner is giving you an off-white page background and you're painting in white. There should be an eyedropper tool that'll let you click a point to select that colour for your palette.

If the background is untextured then the normal paint brush is probably a better bet than the healing brush (which is designed to smudge). I don't know the default settings for that so you may want to turn off/down any soft edges or transparency effects on it.

Originally Posted by rockmonkey1973

also what is the easiest method for drawing a simple straight line? lets say i have borders around a picture but the border is a simple maybe 3mm width black line and one side isnt showing properly so i wanted to draw it in.

There should be a line tool of some description where you click both ends and it draws a line between them, I'm not familiar with photoshop specifically but the icon is usually a straight, diagonal line with small crosses at one or both ends.

[rockmonkey1973]

cheers mate.

i must be using a different white then because the numbers were definately not 0. i will have anither look and see. it isnt a major biggy really because they are going to be turned into pdfs and then mobi and it is unoticeable when in those formats.

i will also have a ganders at google and see what i can find it is sometimes just easier to get someone who knows to tell... if you know what i mean.

good tip though on the paint brush. i did actually try to paint but i couldnt actually get anything to work which is when i got creative with rectandle marque tool and the paint can!

basically i am looking for lazy quick way to tidy things up yet still retain a degree of quality to the work and i am thinking this isnt possible. once i have got a few more books under my belt i may create a how to thread for anyone interested in scanning and digitizing books themselves. i have read countless pages on the topic and yet i still ran into a few issues!!! learning on the job so to speak.

if it wasnt for the hamnd written text on the books themselves i wouldnt even be bothering with photoshop the scans are simply good enough on there own. lets just say i am seriously impressed with the results of the two books i have finished so far.

[EndlessWaves]

Photoshop may have some sort of fancy text cleanup function but it's not a standard tool in photo editing programs.

The other approach would be to use text recognition (OCR) software that will spit out a word document instead of an image but it may not be faster if they're handwritten and contain lots of images.

[rockmonkey1973]

no mate i dont think have been clear enough or maybe i have and i dont fully understand your post. the books are climbing guides and i have written in them when i have done a route. it may be as simple as a tick or just a brief note next to the actual description of the climb. this is what i am trying to get rid of.

i am actually not too bothered about using ocr software on the documents because i dont need the text to be searchable and i dont think that would remove any of the handwritten stuff. it would most likely treat a lot of it as images and ignore it. Plus there are a ton of images in the books and it would take a lot longer proof reading it to make sure it is all correct than what i am currently spending in photoshop just removing it.

i do though need to research exactly how i am going to make the pdfs click-able if you know what i mean. basically i would like the chapters/ crags/ places etc to be linkable in the chapter menu. not sure how i am going to do this yet so if you have any pointers before i get started on that then they would be helpful.

that though is quite a way away. while i can scan a book in about 2 hours the clean up operation on the pages (where i have written on them) did take quite a bit of time. i am planning on it taking me a book a week which will take me nigh on a year to complete!!!! i guess it will/ does only take about 5 hours in total but it is finding a spare 6 hours which is why the target is so long.