DIY Book Scanner

I have a page from the house I now live in. I wisely snapped a photo of it a few years ago but since have misplaced it. I don't know if this is the proper forum to ask, but as I'm getting into book scanning, I thought someone here might have some advice.

How can I flatten this document in this photo? It is a bit wrinkled and I'm at a loss. If it was just curved it would be easy. I hadn't planned on creating a more presentable image of this piece of my home's history at the time I photographed it, or I would have done the obvious things like setting it under glass, etc.

I've included a copy of the photo to illustrate what I'm working with.

Thanks!

I'd probably just grab smaller sections of the document and skew them individually in Photoshop to try to get something that appears more flat, then stitch these processed sections back together into an image that represents the 8.5x11" page. There seem to be about six separate horizontal sections of the page that you could process on their own and you can just crop the margins and replace them with white-filled rects.

You'll also need to tweak the brightness level by decreasing the number of levels in Photoshop or perhaps Scan Tailor can help with this if you choose to do this processing step on the entire page.

If it's not too much trouble, post the result of your flattened page here.

Jerry7171 wrote: ↑14 Jul 2018, 08:53 How can I flatten this document in this photo? It is a bit wrinkled and I'm at a loss.

You could put it under a sheet of glass, or you could try to iron it, but not hot.

Or fold the folds or creases in reverse direction, but doing it gently.

Nuance Omnipage enhancement tools include a 3D Deskew function which uses a grid that can be adjusted to provide some degree of correction, but at a quick look isn't sophisticated enough to provide full correction. Possibly there are more powerful tools available.

Combined with a certain amount of standard image editing (conversion to grayscale, cropping, levels adjustment applied to selected areas, and pasting white areas over selected darker areas) I get the following result in a quick test:



Just a very quick proof of concept test, a better result might be possible, but not enough control to straighten the bottom of the image although some further improvement might be possible.

Edit:

Comparing the above image with the original above, with a little more time it might well be possible to produce rather more obvious deskewing, but really a more powerful deskew tool would be helpful.

Another option: Since you only have a single page to worry about, just deskew the photo and create the text sections yourself in Word. Paste the photo into the document and you're done.

This is my attempt. I used Scan Tailor Experimental and manual mode in ("curved lines") in "Geometric Distortions" section. More patient adjustments of the grid may provide a little bit better result. Maybe Abbyy FineReader and its "Straighten lines" function may do it better? I do not know.

The bottom part is the most challenging. It seems that correcting it would require advanced graphics editor and careful work.