I have a png file that has some letters, the letters are blurry after the
scanning and I would like to enhance the tone of the letters, the letters
are black and the document is in many colours but black. How can I isolate
the black, thus the letters, from all the other colours and then enhance the
colour black so that the letters are thick and solid.

Bit hard to tell without seeing the image, but blurry numbers are a bit hard to select.

Can you clone out the numbers and then add numbers with the text tool?

-- Owen

On 12 December 2011 09:07, Arbol One wrote:

I have a png file that has some letters, the letters are blurry after the scanning and I would like to enhance the tone of the letters, the letters are black and the document is in many colours but black. How can I isolate the black, thus the letters, from all the other colours and then enhance the colour black so that the letters are thick and solid. ****

** **

** **

Thanks in advance.****

If you scanned a black and white document in colour and don't mind losing all the colour, a quick fix is turning the png to Grayscale and then increasing Brightness/Contrast to your liking.

If you have colours other than black that you'd rather not grayscale: - use the rectangle tool to select the text, - reduce Saturation (several tools in the Colour menu do this) until it's all some shade of grey rather than colour, - then fiddle with Brightness/Contrast until the black is an acceptable black and the white is the appropriate white to match the rest of the document.

not sure if that

On 12 December 2011 09:53, Xiella Harksell wrote:

On 12 December 2011 09:07, Arbol One wrote:

I have a png file that has some letters, the letters are blurry after the scanning and I would like to enhance the tone of the letters, the letters are black and the document is in many colours but black. How can I isolate the black, thus the letters, from all the other colours and then enhance the colour black so that the letters are thick and solid. ****

** **

** **

Thanks in advance.****

If you scanned a black and white document in colour and don't mind losing all the colour, a quick fix is turning the png to Grayscale and then increasing Brightness/Contrast to your liking.

If you have colours other than black that you'd rather not grayscale: - use the rectangle tool to select the text, - reduce Saturation (several tools in the Colour menu do this) until it's all some shade of grey rather than colour, - then fiddle with Brightness/Contrast until the black is an acceptable black and the white is the appropriate white to match the rest of the document.

not sure if that

was what you were looking for.

(sorry accidentally sent.)

Xiella

On 12 December 2011 09:53, Xiella Harksell wrote:

On 12 December 2011 09:53, Xiella Harksell wrote:

On 12 December 2011 09:07, Arbol One wrote:

I have a png file that has some letters, the letters are blurry after the scanning and I would like to enhance the tone of the letters, the letters are black and the document is in many colours but black. How can I isolate the black, thus the letters, from all the other colours and then enhance the colour black so that the letters are thick and solid. ****

** **

** **

Thanks in advance.****

If you scanned a black and white document in colour and don't mind losing all the colour, a quick fix is turning the png to Grayscale and then increasing Brightness/Contrast to your liking.

If you have colours other than black that you'd rather not grayscale: - use the rectangle tool to select the text, - reduce Saturation (several tools in the Colour menu do this) until it's all some shade of grey rather than colour, - then fiddle with Brightness/Contrast until the black is an acceptable black and the white is the appropriate white to match the rest of the document.

not sure if that

was what you were looking for.

(sorry accidentally sent.)

Xiella

Or you might also be looking for the Posterise tool? Again not sure if that was what you were looking for sorry.

Xiella

As far as I can tell you are trying to maintain most of the information of the scanned image, just enhance the letters.

First, without seeing the actual image I'm not sure if this can help you, but maybe it will give you some ideas.

What I would do is (I'm writing this just remembering, some options may be named differently):

* Duplicate the layer * Play with the level tool (in the new layer) until your text is all clear (no matter the images)
o For this you can press the left mouse button on any point of the image to see what part or the historigram belongs to what part of the image, so you can make the letters black (down) and the rest white (up) o You probably want to change the level from "smooth" to "freehand"
* Add layer mask -> Grayscale copy of the image * Invert the mask
* Paly with the level tool (but now in the recently created mask) until you are happy with the result * Export/Save or merge layers and there you have

Also instead of playing with the levels tool you can just use posterize, but I usually don't like the hard edges that you get with this.

Hope that the explanation was not too bad and can help you at least something and good luck!

- mIKEL

On 11/12/11 21:07, Arbol One wrote:

I have a png file that has some letters, the letters are blurry after the scanning and I would like to enhance the tone of the letters, the letters are black and the document is in many colours but black. How can I isolate the black, thus the letters, from all the other colours and then enhance the colourblack so that the letters are thick and solid.

Thanks in advance.

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Arbol One writes:

.. the letters are black and the document is in many colours but black. How can I isolate the black, thus the letters, from all the other colours ...

Are you sure that the letters are just black? Usually due to anti-aliasing there are shaded colours around the black letters. They make the letters look better. If the shaded colours are blurred it is pretty hard to reduce the blurring to just the amount needed for the letters to look good again.

See e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_rasterization

-- Johan