fixing images?

[PandathePanda]

Hi

I recently got hold of this book The Harvester by Gene Stratton-Porter. it was printed before 1922 as the date of the original owner in it is, 9 march 1922.

I am going to take a image of the title page and then try to clean it up and add it to the book I linked (mostly for private use I think), but I'm not sure if it is cleanable, I took a photo with my dumb phone as an example, would like to know if someone here has experience trying to clear something like this up.

[HarryT]

You can certainly make it look an awful lot better, but ideally you need to take a picture with a decent camera, not a phone, make sure it's square on to the page, to minimize distortion, and illuminate the page with a bright light. Your picture is out of focus, and was taken from below the page, resulting in distortion (parallel lines are converging towards the top of the image). But yes, get a picture that's in sharp focus, and any decent image editing program will be able to make it look much, much better.

The attached is the result of 5 minutes playing in Lightroom, but I can't do anything about the fact that the original picture is horribly out of focus. Get a picture that's properly in focus, and it'll look fine.

[PandathePanda]

Thanx harry.

Tried to photograph it, but it struggles. My dad said I can use his scanner. Hopefully that work better. The problem is that the book is not in that great condition, the ink is not as crisp as it was once. And there are a few pages where the ink is so bad you can't read what is printed

[HarryT]

There are several copies of it at archive.org:

https://archive.org/search.php?query...tratton-porter

Several of them seem to have good title-page images. Perhaps you could use an image from one of those instead?

This one is a good-quality version, with illustrations:

https://archive.org/details/harvester00straiala

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by HarryT

There are several copies of it at archive.org:

https://archive.org/search.php?query...tratton-porter

Several of them seem to have good title-page images. Perhaps you could use an image from one of those instead?

This one is a good-quality version, with illustrations:

https://archive.org/details/harvester00straiala

While I think scanning the cover and learning what's needed, to do that right, would be enlightening, the archive.org copies are probably far, far better than would ever be achieved from the existing cover, as near as I can see it, from that photo. Nicely done, those!

Is GG around? @GrannyGrump? This is in her wheelhouse, too, isn't it?

Hitch

[HarryT]

Yes, I must confess (and sacrilege to say it, I know ) that these days, when I want to read a book like that, I download the scanned PDF from archive.org and read it on my iPad.

[grumbles]

If you want the best possible images from the Internet Archive do NOT use the PDF files. Instead, download the jp2 files. These are large downloads but the image quality is MUCH, MUCH better. Whatever software they use to produce the PDF files does a really bad job with images.

The jp2 files are in fact jpeg 2000 format images which will have to be converted to something else for most applications. I've found that XnView or XnConvert does a good job.

[PandathePanda]

Originally Posted by HarryT

There are several copies of it at archive.org:

https://archive.org/search.php?query...tratton-porter

Several of them seem to have good title-page images. Perhaps you could use an image from one of those instead?

This one is a good-quality version, with illustrations:

https://archive.org/details/harvester00straiala

Thanx for this, got the one you linked at the bottom. Had a look thru the other ones too, but seems my edition is not on the archive , so might still scan it in, as I like to make a copy of my ebooks look as close as possible to my printed copy.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by grumbles

If you want the best possible images from the Internet Archive do NOT use the PDF files. Instead, download the jp2 files. These are large downloads but the image quality is MUCH, MUCH better. Whatever software they use to produce the PDF files does a really bad job with images.

The jp2 files are in fact jpeg 2000 format images which will have to be converted to something else for most applications. I've found that XnView or XnConvert does a good job.

Thanks - that's a useful tip. I've not come across JP2 format before, but I see that my usual image editing program, "PaintShop Pro X6" will read it, so that should be OK.