Preserved Topic: out, out, evil dots!! (Page 1 of 1)

All righty ? gotta a problem that my limited Photoshop and scanning knowledge just can?t solve.

I design ads for a daily newspaper. Oftentimes art for the ads is provided and so I have to scan them in, resize and tweak them in Photoshop 6, place them in Quark and go to print.

Problem is that the provided art is one of two things: poor quality (like something sent over fax or ran off on a copier) or provided as ?camera-ready.?

I?ll start with the camera-ready crap -- It is screened (has all those dots ya know). I scan it and the scanner picks up all those dots and winds up showing some horrible banding and/or when I print it shows a moray(sp?) pattern (dots on dots). The options on my HP ScanJet 6300C are limited. I tried all the various settings and end up with minimal improvement. In Photoshop I fiddle with various modes (greyscale, bitmap, etc), filters (unsharp mask, despeckle, blurs), and I mess with the levels, curves and such. Once again, I get only marginal improvements. If there is a way to solve this problem, then I would assume it falls into the realm of deeper Photoshop knowledge than I have. Can y?all point me in the right direction to get better quality in my final product?

The poor quality art is another common stress; I have to deal with it daily. One example: I had to include a Nascar logo in an ad. The logo provided was total crap and was not even worth the time to work with. I hunted one down off the Nascar web site and brought it up in PS. Of course, it was way too small for my purposes. So I used magic wand on the background (all white), inverted the selection, and scaled the selection up to the size I needed. I filled the selection with black but wound up with a horrible feathered edge. No idea how to get rid of the feathering. Feathering was not on when I made the original selection, so why is it like that? Good grief ? just no idea ?

Anyways, I may not have made myself perfectly clear here, but I?ll answer questions as best I can to bring things into focus more if needed. Thanks in advance for the assist ?


BeeKay
Murphy's 50 Laws of Combat Operations
11. Try to look unimportant -- the enemy may be low on ammo.
23. When in doubt -- empty your magazine.

Steve is smart.

what the ....?

Steve N is our resident 'genius' .. thats who Eyezaer means me guesses.

I just did a search on google using the terms 'removing moire' and got a load of different websites that deal with the subject Beekay. The overall opinion seemed to be avoiding scanning those types of images!

If you enlarging an image from the web, it base resolution is likely to be 72ppi. Which means that when you try and enlarge it, your not gonna get a very clean edge.

Maybe you can make the selection like you said, but convert the selction to a path, then transform the path larger? That might give you a much nicer edge.

good luck ~Vp~

Very handy with some Quick Mask:
http://shiva.snu.ac.kr/KPT/Tips/KPT10/KPT10.html

I know what you mean, See the same problem and the web has just made it worse. Now eveyone sends us there logo off there web page expecting it to work for print work. You try to explain or request what you need but in most cases thats all there is to work with.

I think I have reworked that Nascar logo too. I find it just faster and better to recreate the logo's correctly using the jpg or gif as a template. I find it takes longer on average to clean it up half assed in photoshop when I would have been quicker and easyer just to recreate it from scratch in photoshop or Illustrator. Most logo are simple and use comon fonts it usally take less the half and hour to recreate most company logos.

There several methods to remove moire problems. None are perfect but most will do when you have no other choice.

I would first check to see if your scanner has a "Descreen" function, ours seems to work will.

I like to do the following, It still requires clean-up but it's better then nothing.

1. Scan your image at the highest res possable or 2x your normal at least.

2. Screen angles are generally 15-13 degrees from each other, try rotating the image 15 deg. when scanning until you get the best scan possable.

3. Bring the image into photoshop and move to lab mode. Try bluring the L channel as this will not effect your color balance. I frequently add a bit of noise which sometime helps with morie in textiles.

4. Convert back to CYMK or RGB, and scale your image down to your proper size and resolution.

5. Edit as need and add some slight sharpening. Take care sharpeing may bring back the morie so use only a vary litte.


jstuartj



[This message has been edited by jstuartj (edited 09-08-2001).]

Ah, gosh. Good one jstuart! Took the words right outa my mouth, even put in some that weren't there to begin with!

If the pre-screened original is B/W, the 15 degree trick might just work. The problem is that the pattern in the dots intereferes with the scanner's native pattern, and is furthr compliced when the new screen is added. The 15 degree trick attempts to avoid the screen angle/scanner grid problem (guess I should say you have to rotate it back in Photoshop after scanning!), and the high resolution suggestion is to try to try to scan with sample spots smaller than the dots of the origina's halftone screen - more sample spots per halftone dot. Make any sense?

If the original is color, the 15 degree trick doesn't work, since you have 4 screen angle to deal with. Other creative mucking around will be required.

One TREMENDOUS resource for anyone and everyone who works with images for print is Dan Margulis' book "Professional Photoshop 6". I can't praise this highly enough. It won't be of much interest for web artists or illustrators, but anyone who prepares files for print really must have this on their shelves. Newspaper has some severe problems to begin with, and much of what he covers is color (don't know how much you print color), but tell you boss you need it tomorow.

God help you with the art faxed in. What some people will do is just unbelievable. That goes beyond anything I've experienced! Dan talks quite a bit in this newest edition of his book about dealing with lousy originals, but he's mostly referring to digital images shot by amateurs with cheap pointand shoot consumer level cameras. Faxed art Oh, I feel your pain.

On the anti-aliased edge, try layer>>matting>>defringe

If it`s on a black or white bg, use remove black matte, or remove white matte as needed.



some days, it`s just not worth the trouble to chew through the restraints in the morning.

Oh - I forgot the logo. Desperate measures sometimes are the only hope. I agree with jsturart about recreating it, except -- well, you don't always have that hour, do you? For all it's flaws, newspaper work does have one thing going for it - it's pretty low quality to begin with! No disrespect. I just mean you can play a little looser than you could for a magazine or brochure. One thing I would have done is to size it up BEFORE selecting it. Magic wand is fast but imprecise. To res up after selecting magnifies that imprecision. So - first size it with free transform (set the logo layer to 50% opacity first so you can see the underlying layer for positioning, then return to 100% after scaling). Then if you must use the wand, play with the tolerance until it bites out as much background as possible. Shift click to get inside shapes like the A and the R before hitting delete. Might be good enough, might need some hand work with eraser or layer mask (my preference).

One thought - blend modes. If the logo background is white and the logo itself some darker color, then try setting the layer with the logo to multiply - the white becomes invisible, and the logo just might seem to feel more a part of the underlying image as well. Might be able to avoid most masking that easily.

Good luck!

~sigh~ been a long week back after labor day has it people?. ~Vp~

Hot damn!! I'm sending a marriage proposal to each of you as soon as my wife gives her stamp of approval. Great stuff here let me tell ya. You guys make me look so smart to my boss and co-workers, hehehehehe

Will play some with your suggestions once I return to work next week and let you know how it turns out.

I love my job, best I have had in years, but there is still so much I don't know. And dealing with joe-blow public, who doesn't know anything about what I have to go through to create an ad for him/her, just drives me crazy some times!!

Thanks again guys ... get back with ya in a few days ...

BeeKay
Murphy's 50 Laws of Combat Operations
11. Try to look unimportant -- the enemy may be low on ammo.
23. When in doubt -- empty your magazine.

No joke there VP. An' on top of it all, someone swiped me drink in another thread.


BeeKay - I'm not ready for any more committments in my life, but thanks for the thought. Think we could just be "friends"??

Well steves right. The 15 Deg. rotation tick is limited for artwork. It does however work to some extent on 4-color images. I most cases the morie occurs in the hightligh and midtone range. In a four color image there is not often enough black dots to cause a morie and yellow is too light to show a visable morie. The leaves only the Magenta and Cyan to deal with. The are generally at 75 and 105 Deg If you following the US swop standard. So you just angle the image to match one of these to colors depending on the morie you are getting.

Art work is a different case however as black occurs more often and larger solid areas of tints are more common.

Back before we had Photoshop and we were scanning image old crossfeild drum scanners we would just throw the scanner slightly out of focus and rotate the image to match the Cyan or Magenta and scan and pray. We did have a retouch/assembly station but it cost far too much to run for editing out morie using 1024 + 1024 pixels at a time in edit mode.

jstuartj




[This message has been edited by jstuartj (edited 09-08-2001).]