Cleaning scanned magazine pages

[rich2005]

Quote:When selecting a background color to be - erased/turned to white - what would be the best way to pick a wider range of grayness than the rather sparse instruction the recipe suggests "By Color, click with mouse pointer on the color of the background."

A quick scan as an example.

You can adjust the color select threshold to make more/less selective. Typically the default value is 15 and clicking on an 'empty' space in the image background gives something like this. The top text is selected but so is a lot of the 'reverse'

screenshot http://i.imgur.com/Kg1JJtT.jpg

Then it becomes a matter of increasing the threshold until you get a satisfactory result. This one a compromise, a few speckles remaining from the reverse and a light section from the top missing.

http://i.imgur.com/krOkNab.jpg


and the result http://i.imgur.com/TShnZff.jpg


There are other ways to adjust a selection, parts can be painted out using a quick mask or selections can be combined using the selection modes. It all depends on the original scan and time and effort.

and...agree with ofnuts there are more economical ways but get something working first.