Restoring Old Books & Magazines

[coffeemom]

Hello,

I'm trying to restore some antique books and magazines I have. I was wondering if anyone knows how to get rid of the dark color that is in some of the letters.

For example, I make the background white and use all of the "enhance photo" tools, but the closed letters like "o" or "d", etc. look like they're colored in. I don't know how to get that out without going over each letter, which would take forever.

I have Corel Paint Shop Pro X2.

Thank you!

[jyoung]

Welcome to Talkgraphics.

If it is a solid color, maybe you could try using the magic wand to select the area inside the letter. You should be able to then hold down the shift key and click inside another letter to select it as well. You can do this to select all the necessary letters then fill the selections the color you want. I think that would work but there is probably an easier way that some else may know of.

Hope that helps.

[coffeemom]

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the information. But the only thing is that it would take so long that way. That would be good for the titles and headings, but these letters are filled all the way down the page.

Thank you anyway for trying to help out. And thanks for the welcome!

[handrawn]

Hi welcome

can you post up an example of a page? difficult to comment without seeing what is involved

[David O'Neil]

In older versions, you could 'select all', and then 'Selections->Modify->Select color range.' You could also select a small portion, and do 'Selections->Modify->Select similar.'

Hope that gets you started.

[coffeemom]

Thanks for all the responses. Here is a sample of what I'm talking about. See how the letters are filled in? It would take forever to retouch each one of those. It wouldn't be bad on the main title, but the rest of the text would take too long.

http://www.geocities.com/homemakingebooks/sample.jpg

[HayTay]

coffeemom,

I think that using the XX4/XXP4 built in Photo Tool (P) and then the Brightness Levels Dialog will fix you right up. Take a look...

The result shown took about 30 seconds of playing.

IHTH,
HayTay

P.S. - I'm an idiot (but you probably already knew that). I just realized that this is the Corel Paint Shop Pro topic area. I'll leave the post for now as I'm fairly sure that PSP has a similar feature that you can use. Hopefully this will jog your memory or get you started in the right direction. Then again, you could always try XaraXtreme since you now know it can be used to accomplish your task.

--> Moderators, delete or move as you see fit.

I'll crawl back to my cave now.

My apologies,
Harry

[coffeemom]

Thanks, Harry! That does look good! I'll see if I can find something similar in PSP or look into the XaraXtreme.

[David O'Neil]

Adjust -> Color Balance -> Black and white points. Play with settings.

[David O'Neil]

Or follow the advice in my first post--those methods will also work.