Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Image enhancement??? Help?

This is for those of you who are technically adept and know about digital imaging software. I have a dilemma and so far can't figure a way out of it.

I did some research over the summer and now have a lot of saved images in digitalised form. The main problem is that, thanks to the technology on the other end, the pictures don't have the greatest resolution. I really need to find a program/way to increase their visibility as well as the text underneath (they're from newspapers).

Any suggestions? Are there any web programs that are easy to use that would work for this?

You know, I'm such a grim reaper when it comes to resolution. The problem with resolution in general is we all want to up the resolution and in doing so, we add in information that doesn't exist, and photos look even more blurry. Personally, Adobe Photoshop is my emperor for images. Most of the programs I know cost $$$, but usually there's a free 30 day trial download--I just don't know if they'll let you save anything. All babbling ceased, I'm interested in what other people have to say, in case there are other programs they like.

Best of luck,
Jen

The real problem has already been mentioned - increasing the resolution of images is limited by the lack of existing data to get a better quality.

There are of course some algorythms which work best with images by creating neighboring colors in additional pixels but lack to work with text because of that. Instead of getting images with better text-quality you get pretty similar quality in form of a blurred text in higher resolution. In my opinion you can get a similar result by working with zooming in and applying sharpening/blurring features yourself.

I haven't had much experience with text parts besides the realization that it's much easier to do with pictures

If you can't read the txt on the original image, there is probably no way to make it *readable* because, as Shadow and Bettina have already said, that information doesn't exist.

If you can read the text just a little bit though (and I don't know what you need to do this for, but if you want to put the image on your website or something) you might consider type it out and publish it that way (it is an awful lot of work, but if nothing else helps..)

It's probably too late now, but for future reference, one of the problems with a lot of saved graphics files is that most software now defaults to using the .jpg format, and that's a "lossy" format; detail gets lost every time files are edited and saved, unless you are very careful about the compression settings etc. That's a real problem if you're working on files that are supposed to be read as text.

.gif is much better in this respect, but can only handle 256 colours or grey scales - this shouldn't be a problem with most newspaper images. .tif and .png files are lossless and can handle millions of colours, but tend to be much bigger.

Best of all, of course, is to use OCR software to convert the text to a real text file, then embed any pictures in it, using e.g. Word to produce a PDF file, or any HTML editing program if you want a web page.

Thank you all for your responses. I think I should clarify a couple things.

I have some overly light images thanks to the lousy exposure on the microfilm. What I'm really looking to do is darken the pictures just a little so they aren't so blinding.

In regards to the text. It's legible right now. I just worry that when I blow it up for the presentation it's going to become illegible on the big screen and I was wondering if there was any way to fix that.

I don't happen to have Photoshop or any of that software, unfortunately, so maybe these are easy things to do in those programs but I just don't realise it?

Oh ok. Definitely you can toggle around with picture darkness and brightness. Have you ever gotten any free programs with your computer? MSPaint, a photo editor, or anything? I've got Windows sitting under my bed somewhere right now, but Microsoft dumped like two free photo programs in when I bought the computer 5 years ago. Most of those programs will easily let you brighten and darken photos.

What are you going to use to blow up the pictures for the presentation? Just curious. Or maybe a better question is, what type of presentation is this? (i.e. Powerpoint, some kind of multi-media, etc)

In the pay programs like Photoshop, you'll lose the text if you blow it up, so most of the time, I end up editing the photograph and retyping the text layer myself.

Jen

I so totally agree with you I usually use PNG types, cause I think jpg makes the picture look so awful! Yay, finally someone who agrees with me