|
Not really a time saver, but it might be if you are not so much a nitpicker as I am. I use this for black on white illustrations, with mainly white background:
- Open original raw scan (from archive.org, or from my own scan)
- Convert to grayscale, straighten (measure angle and rotate arbitrary), crop
- Add a completely black layer on top, but set the blend mode to the one that makes everything black except pure white pixels in the background. In GIMP this is called "Burn".
- Add a transparent layer between the background and the black one.
- Open the "Levels" dialog for the background layer, move the controls so what should be white shows through the top black layer, and the lower peak in the histogram is below the black level.
- Cover the speckles in the background by painting white on the middle transparent layer (this makes it easy to delete if I paint too much, better than undo). This is the most time-consuming part, but it really does make a difference (to me).
- When satisfied, disable the top black layer, flatten, save as PNG for storing, scale down if desired and save as JPG for using.
|