automatic selection of photo's in scanned magazine page

Comments and discussions about Adobe Photoshop
Post Reply
casper

automatic selection of photo's in scanned magazine page

Post by casper »

I wish to image-enhance scanned grayscale magazine pages, using different settings for text and halftone photo's.

There are hundreds of pages, so I'd like to do it automatically, in batch mode with Photoshop 6.0.1.

The photo's are generally well separated from the text (but not always rectangular).

Is there a plug-in that will automatically select the photo's or the text?

Better yet, is there a plugin that will clean up the whole page, descreening the photo and darkening/sharpening the text, etc.

Thanks for you help and advice![/u]

HaraldHeim
Plugin Guru
Plugin Guru
Posts: 3363
Joined: Fri Mar 08, 2002 1:00 am
Location: The Plugin Site
Contact:

Post by HaraldHeim »

What you describe is a very specialized tasks. Plugins usually do more general tasks, unless you hire someone to write one for you that does such a specialized task.

But I think with some experimentation you will be able to do that with the help of a Photoshop Action. You will need to invest some time, but if you have a lot of images to process, it will be worth the investment.

I think Photoshop 6 already lets you record the usage of the magic wand into Actions. So you can use the magic wand to create a selection of the text. Inverting the selection should select the photo. However, this will only work, if the photo and the text are located very similarily on each of your hundred pages.

Otherwise, only create two Actions that do the image manipulation for the photo as well as for the text and select the photo and text manually before applying the Action. This doesn't let you use Batch mode, but still saves you a lot of time.

casper

Post by casper »

Thanks for your reply Harald.

The manual selection method was what I started with, but it's just too cumbersome....

I've experimented with the magic wand and actions, problem is, try as I might, I can't figure a way to select text or image only. Perhaps someone has figured this out and would post their solution?

In the mean time, I'll investigate another avenue: scanning software that autodetects images and allows separate settings for text and images. Silverfast?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

Casper

HaraldHeim
Plugin Guru
Plugin Guru
Posts: 3363
Joined: Fri Mar 08, 2002 1:00 am
Location: The Plugin Site
Contact:

Post by HaraldHeim »

If you could upload one of your images somewhere and place the link here, I could try to investigate it and give you some suggestions.

I only know OCR software that can seperate images from text. But this type of software usually has no image processing features.

casper

Post by casper »

Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2003 9:52 am    Post subject:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you could upload one of your images somewhere and place the
link here, I could try to investigate it and give you some suggestions.

Thanks for the kind offer Harald! I uploaded a 200dpi test image to:

http://home.earthlink.net/~c.mol/200_dpi_test_image.jpg

The images I work on are actually 400dpi, but there was no room left on the server for a larger file. But this will give you an idea.

I'll check back in afew days.

Cheers[/quote]

HaraldHeim
Plugin Guru
Plugin Guru
Posts: 3363
Joined: Fri Mar 08, 2002 1:00 am
Location: The Plugin Site
Contact:

Post by HaraldHeim »

Well, I think, the only to batch process these scans and to apply different effects to the images and text is to write a plugin. This plugin would have to detect the images and the text and apply a different effect to each of them.

For example FilterMeister (www.filtermeister.com) could be used to write such a plugin. But it means quite some work.

Otherwise, use my earlier suggestion to create actions for the effects and manually select the images and the text.

Guest

Post by Guest »

Thanks Harald for looking into this some more.

I think your last suggestion is probably the way to go. But I will check out Filtermeister.

Cheers,

Casper

Post Reply