Request for Scanning Advice

[tuffy]

Originally Posted by haVEFun here

Posted in the hustler vintage thread the pictorial of "sandy" (i.e. heather lere)
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=2166546&postcount=898


Tried scanning the pages with a blackened paper on back, with a matt black cover book and a green cover book: little improvement gained: still “bleed through” of the image on the reverse side occurs, very annoying, especially when merging is needed; skin on left page, too “tanned”, on right page, too pink/purple, extremely difficult and time consuming (several hours needed) to get to an acceptable result.





Any advice any one?

Also scanned the first separate picture from page 92 (92a) twice, at 300 and at 600 dpi , what looks better on a large and/or HQ monitor (graining/moire/flat look) ?




thanks;

(I) have fun here.

I corrected the links to the original pics above. They are clickable now.

I hope this helps to watch the scans.

Tuffy

[deepsepia]

One trick for "bleed through"

Scan the reverse page, line up the reverse scan as a layer, and then subtract.

You'll have to play with the layer effects . . . this approach works well with a dark reverse image bleeding through on a white scan. No need for great resolution on the reverse scan, in fact a little blur will help

[haVEFun here]

Yes, thanks deepsepia, that is next step;

Thought of this layering already, have to figure it out how this works with the software that is available with the scanner ( read the rules: in this case the user guide ). regards haVEFun here

[Jism Jim]

Originally Posted by haVEFun here

Posted in the hustler vintage thread the pictorial of "sandy" (i.e. heather lere)
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=2166546&postcount=898

skin on left page, too “tanned”, on right page, too pink/purple, extremely difficult and time consuming (several hours needed) to get to an acceptable result.

Dekoda made a very informative post about this.

[exfarmer]

I've been playing with the settings on my pdf to jpg software. I set it at 400dpi and this obviously caused the file sizes to increase.
What I need to know is does the quality justify the increased file size?
Here are a couple of samples and the file sizes vary but are around 1.2mb

[Jism Jim]

In my opinion it is complete overkill. This only enlarges the pixels.
I think it would be better to decrease the pixel count instead of increasing it.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by exfarmer

I've been playing with the settings on my pdf to jpg software. I set it at 400dpi and this obviously caused the file sizes to increase.
What I need to know is does the quality justify the increased file size?
Here are a couple of samples and the file sizes vary but are around 1.2mb

Based on what I'm seeing, something's off.

Scanning at 400 dpi should give you reasonably smooth fonts.

But what I see in your scan suggests something much coarser-- here's a section of your scan, look at the pixilation-- by my eye, this looks more like 25 dpi (assuming that the original printed fonts were smooth). Checking resolution issues on type is handy, because type isn't halftoned -- you're just looking at the resolving power of your scan/filesize combo, not issues in processing a halftone.

Its not the filesize -- at 1.4 meg, there are more than enough pixels to show this smoothly. Its something that occurred in the scan.

If you're converting this out of a PDF, my suspicion is that when the PDF was assembled it was done out of a very low res scan. Was this your PDF, or someone else's?

REmember, back in the way back, resolution and scans were tiny.

If I had to guess, I'd have said that this looked like it had originally been scanned to something like 100K. If you're looking at magazine scans for download as PDFs in the early 2000s, the whole PDF might be 4 or 5 meg . . . and if the resolution ain't in the PDF, you can't "get it back" when you convert to JPG.

[exfarmer]

It's not a scan, it's a conversion from a pdf file (not my work) to jpeg. The program offers a dpi setting for the extracted images, I assumed the higher the setting the better the final image. Obviously I was wrong.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by exfarmer

It's not a scan, it's a conversion from a pdf file (not my work) to jpeg. The program offers a dpi setting for the extracted images, I assumed the higher the setting the better the final image. Obviously I was wrong.

So, when you have a PDF like this, its basically just a bunch of JPGs in a PDF wrapper.

These JPGs were clearly scanned at low res, a long time ago.

If you have the full version of Acrobat, or some of the PDF inspection utilities, you can "unpack" a PDF and get access to the native graphics files that are in it.

They are the size that they are -- you can extract them at their native size, but there's no more resolution to be had.

You can use a tool like:
http://www.somepdf.com/some-pdf-image-extract.html

to do this.

You weren't wrong -- there are times when setting a higher resolution on a PDF to JPG conversion will give you better resolution, like when they've embedded text-- in that case, the conversion software will rip the text to the resolution you've set.

But the software really can't do anything with a JPG -- unlike with postscript or truetype fonts, there's no way to compute more pixels.