Need help with making pic more clear and sharper

SH
Posted By
Sara_Henry
Oct 6, 2003
Views
411
Replies
4
Status
Closed
Hi! I am working on taking newspaper articles, cleaning them up, and then placing them in a PageMaker publication. But I’m having a problem with the cleaning up part, as in sharpening the pic. I have PS 6 and when I try the sharpen function, nothing seems to happen. Also, I need to do this so I can decrease the size of the jpeg without diminishing the quality so it doesn’t take up so many bytes in the publication. Please can someone help?

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B
BLUDVLZ
Oct 6, 2003
Use Unsharp Mask instead of Sharpen.

Don’t save as JPEGs… the very nature of the format delivers a less-than-optimal image. Use a TIFF file (with LZW compression) instead.

Use curves or levels to punch up the black and white values… if done correctly this should drastically eliminate much of the newsprint "fuzz" that appears between lines and in the margins.

If at all possible, get the newspaper that originally published the article to send you the actual article or PDF or EPS of the article (whatever file they paginated). This will provide you with a far cleaner end product.
DM
Don_McCahill
Oct 6, 2003
Also, remember that you cannot take a really fuzzy picture and put it back into focus. That only happens on TV and the movies. There is a limit to sharpening and unsharp mask.

Use save for web to make the jpg as small as possible without artifacting happening. Keep lowering the quality until you see problem areas, and then back it off until it is good again.

Again, it is impossible to get high resolution newspaper or magazine images as small as low resolution web images. Check with the production people to see how low you can make the resolution. If they are clever, it will be 200 dpi or lower, and that will cut the size in half from 300 dpi.
JS
John_Slate
Oct 6, 2003
I have to ask…

When you say "newspaper articles" you don’t mean clippings that you have scanned do you?
SH
Sara_Henry
Oct 9, 2003
Thank you all for the suggestions! As for the articles, yes, they are clippings I got – it’s the whole front page of the paper though. I collect a job help section they print

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