Need to flatten illumination of microfilmed docs

[Ol' Bab]

A lot of federal census microfilm images on the Internet are very faint or very dark, in very uneven ways, so the usual brightness/contrast tricks only work on a small part of the image at one time.

Need a way to flatten the brightness, so the paper is about the same brightness everywhere. This could be as primitive as breaking into 32 x 32 pixel blocks and just adjusting each block for identical average background brightness. Faint edges of the blocks would appear where the background changes rapidly between blocks, but this would not affext the legibility.

I can't believe this isn't out there already! Just have to find it. Your help welcome.

Ol' Bab

[HaraldHeim]

You can try Gradient Remover from
http://www.atm-international.com/Astrop ... lugins.htm

or have a look at www.reindeergraphics.com. Maybe they have something like that.

You could also try LightMachine from http://thepluginsite.com/products/photo ... htmachine/
or Photoshop's Shadow/Highlight tool. But both are meant for photos.

[Ol' Bab]

Looks like I'm out of luck. Your three kind suggestions were way off.
Thanks for your effort.

Ol' Bab