after viewing wil freebons great tutorial about scanning and cropping notebookpages, i decided to make a short one about my “quick and dirty” method. i put 2 sheets of colored paper behind the pages i scan (idealy cut out L-shaped so they overlap by the gap). i choose a color, that is most unlikely part of my image, some acid green or else.
i do colorcorrection in the scanners preview manually with curve and saturation-slider (i think most scanner-software allows this) – than i get a close-to-original scan with full use of colorspace. the scan only occasional needs few correction, i do with curve.
now the scan has a colored frame. i use the wand-tool to select the color (play around with tolerance, to get all frame and no image, accidently left outs or selected image-parts i clean with lasso)
than i enlarge selection by 1 pixel, blur selection slightly (0,5 pixel). than doubble click background layer to make it editable and than push the “mask” button on bottom of layer-palette (the square thing with circle in) while pushing alt-key. now the frame is masked away, i got sketchbook-pages free on transparent ground.
you can record all the maneuvers in the last paragraph using the “actions” palette – than you only need to fire that action after selection and get the transparent frame. corrections on the mask can be done using brushtool.
the image file should finally be cropped a bit, as the wand-tool might have left some pixels as an unwanted outer frame. for print, scan sufficient resolutuion and save as tif, for web scale down and safe as jpg.
Thank you so much Rolf, the quick-and-dirty approach was exactly what my protesting arm needed! I even managed to dig up some acid green paper of my own in the studio, and it worked great for framing the pages. I couldn’t figure out how to record the maneuvers – I’ve never used the “actions” palette before – but it was still so very much easier and faster than pain stakingly lassooing each image one by one.
Much gratitude,
Ea