Drawings, TIFF images, etc; Clean up?

[OleBoy]

I've received a large amount of resource materials for a project I'm planning. The images are TIFF format and are drawings dated back 1935. The drawings are very dirty and need cleaning.
I'm looking for suggestions on the best method to clean them for better legibility. I have Adobe Photoshop CS3. Short of opening the images and hand editing, is there any other method that will help?

Any help or guidance is appreciated.

Don

[gaucho_59]

I've received a large amount of resource materials for a project I'm planning. The images are TIFF format and are drawings dated back 1935. The drawings are very dirty and need cleaning.
I'm looking for suggestions on the best method to clean them for better legibility. I have Adobe Photoshop CS3. Short of opening the images and hand editing, is there any other method that will help?

Any help or guidance is appreciated.

Don

You need to be more specific!! What are these things??? Line drawings? Written material... any color plates?
Everything can be doctored... (just check the stuff I do)... but different things get different treatments....

[OleBoy]

You need to be more specific!! What are these things??? Line drawings? Written material... any color plates?
Everything can be doctored... (just check the stuff I do)... but different things get different treatments....

Most of the dirty stuff are black and white line drawings and blueprints on white back grounds. Copies of the originals I think. The originals must have been very soiled over time because some are real bad. Almost not useable.
I may just have to do it manually with the wand and erasure. Not that I've never had to do it this way before. It's very time consuming and tedious is all. I was hoping for short cuts!:mixedsmi:

[gman5250]

I did quite a bit of document restoration years back in PS. There are some basic filters you can run on the old drawings that will make some large global improvements, but the hand work is going to be a big part of it. Bummer, I know.

If you are looking to lift just the lines off the old background, do a super high contrast in black and white. Lift the lines off the background and paste them into another layer. You can run a noise filter then to take out a lot of the remaining pixel noise.
For the blue line drawings you may want to invert them first to a negative which will actually look like a positive.

Color images are a lot more work intensive.


Hope that little bit helps.

[Daveroo]

well theres money laundering........how about a document laundering company?....................:isadizzy:

[Delta_Whiskey]

try doing reducing the color pallet incremently then do and edge find or edge enhance (paintshop pro)

[Dimus]

I'm saying this just in case you have access to someone with CAD software. At work we use AutoCAD by Autodesk. They have an add on called Raster Design. It incorporates scanned images into vector drawings and edits them. There is a function called "despeckle" that does exactly that. We have the same problem reading old scanned ship drawings so we use it very often.

[OleBoy]

All the responses are appreciated. Some I will try, some I won't due to the added expense. I will definitely try some of the suggestions to see how they perform.

Thanks everyone.

Have a GREAT weekend!