Improving picture quality
While researching your family tree, you will come along old sources that need carefull handling. Pictures from these taking in an archive are often not optimal, and need cleaning up to make the text readable. Some pictures are snapshots of microfilm screenreaders.
Here we show how you can work on your picture to make the text come out better, improving readability. All with open source software, off course!
Contents
The sample picture 1
The sample picture is a raw jpeg picture of 1.5Mb. Light is centered in the middle, getting darker at the edges.
Viewing
A good application to view these files is Gwenview (KDE).
Cleaning
Step 1
To edit it, The Gimp comes to the rescue.
- Open the file.
- Select the relevant portion with the
rectangular select tool
. Copy and paste into a new canvas: type respectively, CTRL+C, CTRL+N + click OK, CTRL+V - Save the file in the GIMP xcf format
Step 2
In Gimp, the Filters menu has the correctly named 'Enhance' submenu.
- Choose
2x2 Contrast Enhance
- Select the
Destripe
option, and set the value to 50. - Now, in the Tools menu, go to the Colour Tools submenu, and choose Curves. You can now play with the curve level to get a better contrast on the picture.
We see here that the picture lacks in white and in black, but has a second peak of darkgrey pixels. We enhance the white to make the contrast larger, and we downgrade the importance of the darkgrey peak. We also cut out completely the black. - As a last edit, select the centre highlighted region of the picture with the elliptic selection tool, and select in Tools menu--> Colour Tools the Brightness-contrast option, and reduce the brightness.
Now, save the result as png with maximum compression level. The result:
What does it say?
The reason of editing the picture is to have a nice picture going with the source. However, in some cases, cleaning up is paramount to be able to read the source. Here this is not really the case, but reading might nevertheless be enhanced by the sharper contrast.
The text of this source says:
???? Help !!!
line 1
..... Baptiza-line 2
vus .. Johan L..line 3
filiusline 4
line 5
line 6
van de Voorde
Tutorials on the internet
If you have found a nice tutorial on the net, add it here.
The following are for cleaning with the aim of getting a better result, not to make it more readable.