Removing a Paper Pattern from a Scanned Photo

January 21, 2001

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Let's assume I received this old photo of my cute husbandon his 6th birthday and want to make a poster of it for his 50th birthday.

I scanned as a tif file (for the sake of space we will use a jpg to work on instead) and opened it in PSP only to find the image has a very visible paper pattern in the background that will adversely effect the final image. Plus its a bit aged and faded.

Let's get rid of the paper pattern.

Open the kidonhorse.jpg.

It is a big file at 1417 pixels by 1735 pixels and PSP will use about 7 meg of ram just to open it.

If you have less than 256 meg of ram, I suggest cropping the image to include a portion of the boys face, the house and the horse and of course, the nasty paper pattern! ;)

Use the zoom tool and click in the image to zoom in to 1:1. Use the image scroll bars at the bottom and right sides of the image window to show a representative portion of the image. Take the Crop tool and crop to fit into your PSP window.

Save this portion as a PSP file. Leave the image open to work on.

Here is the portion of the image I chose.

On to fixing this up!
Go to Effects, Blur, Gaussian Blur on PSP's Menu Bar.

On the Gaussian Blur Dialog box, enter a value of between 2 and 2.2 pixels, or just raise the value until the preview shows the paper pattern has disappeared.

Press OK to apply the blur.
To improve the contrast in the image a bit and pop out the detail...

Create a new Levels Adjustment Layer. Go to Layers on the Menu Bar, New Adjustment Layer, Levels.

On the Dialog box that comes up, Pick the General Tab.

Set the Blend Mode to Overlay and the Opacity to about 40 percent.

Make sure the Auto Preview button is pushed, the down arrow button next to the eye near the bottom of the dialog box.

Switch to the Adjustment Tab on the Dialog box.

Work with the levels sliders to improve the image.

I set the Input values to Shadows 0, midtones to .93 and the highlights to 230.

Note the changes in the image. and press OK.

Merge the Levels layer with the image by right clicking on it's name on the Layer palette and picking Merge> Merge all from the flyout box.
Finally, resize the image to about 50 Percent by going to Image on the Menu Bar then Resize... set to 50 Percent and press OK.

Apply an Unsharp Mask to restore the detail. Image > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask from the Menu Bar.

Set the values to Radius 1.00 Strenght 100, Clipping 0.

Press OK.
Notice how much stronger our image is. AND no paper pattern!


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