Hello, I'm new here. I've been checking out some of the awesome covers and poking around the forums a bit, trying to get my feet wet, so to speak.
Ok so I've been trying to scan some stuff of my own to help out, and I've read through the guide in the FAQs section pretty thoroughly. I tried it out for myself and well it seems my scanner just doesn't want to cooperate.
I have an HP Photosmart 2575 All-in-one printer/scanner/copier ....but, the descreen option for whatever reason, just doesn't seem to do anything, even at 200 dpi the images I tried scanning still have the moire effect.
So I tried some suggestions in the scanning guide thread to manually remove moire. I don't have Photoshop, and I wouldn't know my way around it even if I did, but I do have Paint Shop Pro X. I tried using the filters suggested to blur away the moire and resampling down to 600 dpi from 1200 but I really wasn't pleased with the results, even after trying multiple settings and options.
I figured I was just going to have to content myself with scanning at 600 dpi without removing the moire effect and leave it to whoever uses the scans for cover making. Then I stumbled upon something though, using PhotoFiltre of all programs...
Ok so for example, here is a scan I did at 600 dpi, with the descreen effect applied which apparently does jack squat on my scanner:
That's about as good as it looks coming from my scanner, sadly. So I took that image and opened it in PhotoFiltre, which is my go-to freebie alternative to Paint, and I went to Filter > Noise > Dust Reduction . I set Radius to High, and Threshold to 20, and this was the result:
(You may have to view them in their full size to really tell the difference)
To my eyes at least, it appears that it made quite an improvement. PhotoFiltre was the last program I'd have expected, save maybe Paint itself, to be able to help. But does it really help? I don't know anything about the process of creating custom covers and what needs to be done with photoshop, so I was hoping that someone here who does know can tell me if that second image would be significantly easier to work with, worse than the first raw unedited one, or about the same?
If it's useful and would save cover creators a lot of time, then I'll certainly do this before anything I upload. It seems to be the most visible improvement that I've been able to make with what I have. If it's really useful, maybe this can help others who, like me, can't seem to get any sort of descreen effect to work properly with their scanners.
If on the other hand that second image is actually worse for some reason, I'm curious to know why, and at the very least would be glad to know so I can upload just the unmodified scans instead.
Any insight on this would be appreciated. Apologies for the massive first post; I tend to be a bit long winded sometimes
