changing scanned b/w documents to pure b/w

[grunnvms]

Is there a simple way to convert scanned old b/w documents to pure b/w documents? Usually the paper is yellow, the text on the other side of the page shines through a bit etc. 

In Photoshop elements there is a very simple 'newspaper' conversion setting for this if you want to change an RGB document to a b/w document. All the text will be made very black, and everything else will be made white. 

second question. 

In the Convert Format / ICC profile setting, I can convert the colour profile to Grey/8, and the profile to Black and White. I had hoped that this would do the trick, but instead I get an almost entirely black page.

[v_kyr]

There are many different ways to do so. - See therefor ...

• affinity photo convert to black and white

[NotMyFault]

3 hours ago, grunnvms said:

Is there a simple way to convert scanned old b/w documents to pure b/w documents? Usually the paper is yellow, the text on the other side of the page shines through a bit etc. 

In Photoshop elements there is a very simple 'newspaper' conversion setting for this if you want to change an RGB document to a b/w document. All the text will be made very black, and everything else will be made white. 

second question. 

In the Convert Format / ICC profile setting, I can convert the colour profile to Grey/8, and the profile to Black and White. I had hoped that this would do the trick, but instead I get an almost entirely black page.

If you scan yourself: use a black card board behind the paper source. This reduces any shine-through.

If you need to scan many pages: purchase a new scanner capable to scan both sides in one pass. The scanner will eliminate any shine-through during scan, no need to do any post processing.

If you need to process bad scans: a thresholds or curves adjustment will do the trick in most cases.

if not: upload an example document, we will find a solution specific to the scans you have.

 

[grunnvms]

I do know how to scan such documents myself, with proper scanning software these problems are easy to prevent.

The documents that cause the problems come from for instance the newspaper archive of the Royal Library, or in this case from a professional book scanner at the National Archives. These type of scanners are more like digital photo cameras, you put the paper or book below the camara, it will automatically detect the contours, and take a picture.

I have attached such a scan, plus a newspaper scan.

[carl123]

A "Black and White" adjustment layer and a "Levels" adjustment with the values shown below may be a good starting point...

 

[Return]

Or the channel mixer adjustment
 

 

[NotMyFault]

Here my workflow for this file:

1. Noise reduction to get clearer image
2. Levels adjustment to align color channel histogram
3. Levels adjustment to blow-out shine-through
4. Curves adjustment to boost readability of letters
5. HSL adjustment to remove remaining color cast (optional, please deactivate)
6. Black and white adjustment as better option to remove color cast and improve contrast for letters. The color cast is a by-product of sharpening and jpeg compression. We can use it to selectively brighten or darken certain colors which essentially works as sharpen filter for letters while retaining "organic" curvature. com in to 500% while tweaking the sliders.

 

0630full.afphoto

[grunnvms]

Thank you all for the advises, I will try them out.

That leaves two other matters.

1. What is the function of the Black & White profile in the grey/8 and grey/16 ICC profile settings suppose to do ? I can't find any documentation. 
2. If a simple program, like Photoshop Elements has a standard conversion tool for this kind of work, wouldn't it be nice to have something similar in Affinity Photo ?

[NotMyFault]

You can convert a RGB/8 document to a grey/8 document in Photo by one click if this is all you desire.

 

https://affinity.help/photo2/English.lproj/pages/Clr/ClrModels.html

• From the Document menu, choose Convert Format / ICC Profile. Choose a new colour format from the top combo box then click Convert.
   

[NotMyFault]

1 hour ago, grunnvms said:

What is the function of the Black & White profile in the grey/8 and grey/16 ICC profile settings suppose to do ? I can't find any documentation. 

You don‘t have any big choice, similar to LAB there is only one single color profile to choose for GREY. 
I dont know what you mean by black & white profile. 
Do you mean black & white adjustment?

Its name is misleading, it will create greyscale and not B/W, but the naming dates back ages ago and before Affinity apps where created,

 

 

[NotMyFault]

Affinity offers multiple ways to convert from colored to greyscale (aka B/W), it leaves the choice to the users which methods suits best depending on multiple other factors.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, grunnvms said:

What is the function of the Black & White profile in the grey/8 and grey/16 ICC profile settings suppose to do ? I can't find any documentation. 

See ...

• Create new documents

 

Quote

 

Colour (management):

• Colour format—sets the colour mode to RGB (8, 16 or 32 bit HDR), Grey (8 or 16 bit), CMYK (8 bit), or Lab (16 bit).
• Colour profile—sets the colour gamut for the previously chosen colour format.

 

Where 8-bit grayscale would result into a color space (gamut) supporting of 2^8 = 256 grey tone colors and 16-bit grayscale then means that up to 2^16 = 65536 shades of gray would be supported. - A plain 1-bit mode (1^2 = 2) so supporting really just two colors, aka only a black and white color here is not available in APh.

Further for many scanners, scanning in 16-bit grayscale then reducing to 8-bit grayscale usually improves shadow and highlight detail in/for 8-bit grayscale images.

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, NotMyFault said:

Its name is misleading, it will create greyscale and not B/W, but the naming dates back ages ago and before Affinity apps where created,

Yup, no one ever talks about greyscale photography, it’s always called “black and white”.

[v_kyr]

7 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Yup, no one ever talks about greyscale photography, it’s always called “black and white”.

In past analog times you also didn't bought something called a greyscale film, you've bought instead an accordingly named black & white film.

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

In past analog times you also didn't bought something called a greyscale film, you've bought instead an accordingly named black & white film.

Exactly! I remember it becoming more difficult (and more expensive, of course) to buy B&W film and to have it developed. Ilford, one of the major film manufacturers here in the UK, eventually produced a B&W film which could be put through the standard C41 colour process used by all the commercial film processing laboratories, making the whole thing much easier and cheaper.

[Old Bruce]

34 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

In past analog times you also didn't bought something called a greyscale film, you've bought instead an accordingly named black & white film.

The really difficult thing was getting good B&W prints from colour negative film, tungsten or daylight.

18 minutes ago, Alfred said:

... I remember it becoming more difficult (and more expensive, of course) to buy B&W film and to have it developed. Ilford, of the major film manufacturers here in the UK, eventually produced a B&W film which could be put through the standard C41 colour process used by all the commercial film processing laboratories, making the whole thing much easier and cheaper.

Agfa also had a B&W film which could be processed with C-41 chemistry.

I messed about with Kodak's line film which was as close to Black and White film as you could get. Not to mention their infrared sensitive film HIE.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, NotMyFault said:

there is only one single color profile to choose for GREY. 

For "GREY" ? – Or do you mean for B&W?

However, the Affinity UI can't be more misleading in its various panels and swatches. For instance for "Black and White" as document profile:

Note the subtle small area for grays < 100 K in the K slider. It appears for values between 0 and ~ 5% K … but seems to cover the wide range between 0 and 100 K.
Imho in a B&W document no grays or other colours apart from black should be possible, neither in a gradient nor in the interface.

With gradients the colour presentation in the interface gets even more complex. Note the selected CMYK slider for the gradient versus the auto-appearing RGB sliders in the Colours panel:

And compare the appearance of interface and object colours in a Grayscale document:

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

For instance for "Black and White" as document profile:

FWIW, the Apple Black & White.icc profile (in /Library > Color Sync > Profiles on my Mac) does not appear as a document profile choice in Affinity for me in either V1 or V2.

I am not sure why it does for you & not me.

[NotMyFault]

3 hours ago, thomaso said:

For "GREY" ? – Or do you mean for B&W?

 

I mean GREY/8 or GREY/16 color format. There is only one document (generic, not device specific) color profile Grayscale D50 by default, the others are device color profiles. 
 

Except for CMYK (where you use paper color formats which represent the properties of the paper you intend to use for printing), in all other color formats RGB, GREY, LAB normally document color profiles are used and not device color profiles to keep documents portable.

I think the list for color profiles has changed in V2 as non-suitable color profiles get now filtered out.

If you use device color formats, it gets very tricky with adjustments which work directly on color values. All sorts of unexpected effects can happen.

this is my personal view only, and might be incorrect or applicable only in certain  circumstances and not fully generic.

https://www.color.org/slidepres2003.pdf

 

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

The really difficult thing was getting good B&W prints from colour negative film, tungsten or daylight.

As a school boy I had a Black & white darkroom and so dealing more with B&W film, as it was overall easier to handle and more cost effective. Most used stuff (accesories, chemistry, papers, ... etc.) therefor was from Ilford & Agfa, as that was available at several places in the city. B&W film wise I tested & feeded my Nikon FM2 + FE2 with nearly every brands B&W films.

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

Ilford, one of the major film manufacturers here in the UK, eventually produced a B&W film which could be put through the standard C41 colour process used by all the commercial film processing laboratories, making the whole thing much easier and cheaper.

Most stuff I used in my analog B&W darkroom times were from Ilford, as their products were widely available in germany too and more cost efficient than Agfa, Kodak etc.

[R C-R]

28 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

I think the list for color profiles has changed in V2 as non-suitable color profiles get now filtered out.

For me on my Mac there is no difference between V1 & V2 for things like the Black & White.icc profile, which neither version shows. That's why I'm curious why it is showing in @thomaso's screenshots.

[David in Яuislip]

I never liked XP1/2, much preferred FP3/4, HPS, Tri X generally developed in ID11. I dumped all of my darkroom stuff except the enlarger which is a pre-war Focomat and a thing of beauty

Anyway, back to the scan, as a confirmed Luddite I check the channels on scans and choose the one with best contrast, in this case the red
Then create a greyscale layer and apply a curve adjustment

[Alfred]

18 minutes ago, David in Яuislip said:

I never liked XP1/2, much preferred FP3/4, HPS, Tri X generally developed in ID11.

Ilford XP1 was quite adequate for my modest needs, likewise my Minolta XG-1 rather than the more versatile but rather more expensive XG-M. I don’t think I’d ever heard of, let alone tried, XP2, FP3, or FP4.

Have we gone off topic yet?

[v_kyr]

12 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I don’t think I’d ever heard of, let alone tried, XP2, FP3, or FP4.

• Ilford FP (Wikipedia)
• Ilford XP2

Some of the Ilford films were ISO wise very good pushable, for shooting under darker daylight conditions.