Scan old yellowed writings

[HeiYu]

Hi--I am trying to scan my departed grandmother's old recipe
notebook into tiff files which will be used for output, along with
additional scanner material, into a printed book of memories
of sorts for the few remaining family members.

The lined notebook was written both in blue and black ballpoint,
and the pages are unevenly yellowed in places.

I have an Epson 4990 scanner, Silverfast AI, Adobe Elements 2,
the Epson scanner utility, and the Arcsoft software which were all part
of the scanner bundle.
Evidently even good software is still limited by the clueless mind operating
it :-(

I have tried grayscale 16 and 16-->8 bit, lineart, 400 dpi, jpeg, tiff,
Adobe Element's "High pass", but have been unable to arrive at
a workflow which results in acceptable images.

Despite some googling for document restoration tips, I have
not been able to find information specific to what must be a common task.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to do this, or on how to
better educate myself into scanner use? I stare at the
histogram tool and my eyes grow glazed. There may even be a filter for
that....
Thanks!

 

[Don]

Hi--I am trying to scan my departed grandmother's old recipe
notebook into tiff files which will be used for output, along with
additional scanner material, into a printed book of memories
of sorts for the few remaining family members.

The lined notebook was written both in blue and black ballpoint,
and the pages are unevenly yellowed in places.

I have an Epson 4990 scanner, Silverfast AI, Adobe Elements 2,
the Epson scanner utility, and the Arcsoft software which were all
part of the scanner bundle.
Evidently even good software is still limited by the clueless mind
operating it :-(

I have tried grayscale 16 and 16-->8 bit, lineart, 400 dpi, jpeg,
tiff, Adobe Element's "High pass", but have been unable to arrive at
a workflow which results in acceptable images.

Despite some googling for document restoration tips, I have
not been able to find information specific to what must be a common
task.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to do this, or on how to
better educate myself into scanner use? I stare at the
histogram tool and my eyes grow glazed. There may even be a filter for
that....
Thanks!

Take the book to Kinko's (or any body else that has a quality copy
machine with a "full-toner") and make black and white photo copies and
the yellowing will disappear.

Then scan the photo copies.

Line art is also more effective for these types of items than grayscale
or color.

 

[Muriel & Roland]

Hello Jeff,

Hi--I am trying to scan my departed grandmother's old recipe
notebook into tiff files which will be used for output, along with
additional scanner material, into a printed book of memories
of sorts for the few remaining family members.

I have done a similar job, had to scan handwriten notes and old cookbooks
pages (around anno 1850 to 1920).

Some pages were scanned as "256 colors" to show best how old the pages are,
the handwritten annotations, the grease spots and the yellow paper...

Most of the work was done for best reading, as "lineart".
All were saved as pictures, some edited through OCR.

The lined notebook was written both in blue and black ballpoint,
and the pages are unevenly yellowed in places.

Best results I had was clearly with "lineart", dpi set to 300... seldom to
150.

In addition, I had to adjust the threshold mostly to lighter... sometimes to
darker...

Only items you can not scan when doing that way, are white characters on
color background !

I have an Epson 4990 scanner, Silverfast AI, Adobe Elements 2,
the Epson scanner utility, and the Arcsoft software which were all part
of the scanner bundle.
Evidently even good software is still limited by the clueless mind
operating it :-(

I guess any scanner will do that job, this sort of scans are not really
taking the last piece of performance out of the scanner !

I have a relabelled Microtec Scanmaker 6200 scanner (Lifetec by Aldi - USB
2.0, 6400x3200 dpi / 48 bit color, transparency unit LightLid 35, all that
bought new with 3 year warranty for 35 USD or 30 euro ).
It comes with a software (twain interface) named ScanWizard.

I am really happy with this scanner... but not with the VIA-USB chipset
built on my motherboard... which has some problems with the dataflow coming
from the scanner, stopping each scan at 30 to 60%...

I needed almost 3 days to find out the VIA-Chipset is simply not compatible
with at least this Microtek Scanner ;o(((

I decided to put an additional USB-card (with no VIA chip on it) to connect
the scanner.

Now, it works all OK !

I do a lot of work with it, and always try to get the best adjustments
(threshold, brightness, contrast, tone curve, color correction, filter or
descreen) depending of the type of scan (color, lineart, grayscale... with
lineart for exemple, the only one option is 'threshold').

It is always worth putting some extra time to get the best adjustments
before scanning a bunch of papers... then you can scan blindly the next X
hundred pages.

Doing that way I can use the scan without having to modify it with another
software.

I have tried grayscale 16 and 16-->8 bit, lineart, 400 dpi, jpeg, tiff,
Adobe Element's "High pass", but have been unable to arrive at
a workflow which results in acceptable images.

Try to fine-tune the settings before scanning, that will do the difference.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to do this, or on how to
better educate myself into scanner use?

Hope it could help you...

Happy new year to all
Roland