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Eliminating grey from backround in a scanned image


There's many ways to fix your issue in Photoshop.

You can try making a Levels adjustment layer and push the white slider (the one on the right) to the left...

Or you can try masking the gray area out, there's a few different ways to do that.

If you post part of the image I'll take a look and see what would work best.
 
I had already tried the levels idea without much success, and masking seems to be out of the question (at least at my level of CS skill). I created a small sample of the image as a psd file but I can't find a way to post that - would it be OK to convert it to jpeg to post, or will we lose important info? Or is there some other way to post psd files? Or could I just email it to you?
 
You can upload it as an attachment here... just go to advanced reply mode and click the little paper clip icon above the message editor.

You can also do a JPG, just save it at 80% or higher quality setting.
 
Levels adjustment layer worked fine for me.

I noticed there was some artifcating in the color around the black text, so I slid the mid-tones to the right just a bit, and then I slid the white up to crunch that gray until it turned white.

Here's the PSD so you can see what I did, and you can easily just duplicate this adjustment layer to your other scanned images.
 

Attachments

Hey rondans,

Color Range made some quick work of it, at least it seems ok when I printed it out.

Oops, screwed that post up...meant to put the link in.
 

Attachments

  • Test for gray problem.jpg
    Test for gray problem.jpg
    96.5 KB · Views: 1
Last edited:
Yea Select --> Color Range as Rogue suggested is a good way to handle this also.

The stroke effect in my PSD was just so I could distinguish the scanned image form the white background.... it gave me a reference point when I was making the levels adjustment. It's not important.

Just play with the levels sliders until it looks right if you are going to go that route.
 

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