Remove scotch tape marks on old painting manuscripts

Dear photoshop experts,

I have scanned old manuscripts dating from the 1920s and I am retouching them to try to restore their original state.

On some images, there are old scotch tape marks which look dark brown. Is there a way in which I can remove these marks in an automatic way ? Ideally I would record a script to automate the treatment

Thank you

Jean-Marie

"jm.almeras" wrote:

I have scanned old manuscripts dating from the 1920s and I am retouching them to try to restore their original state.

On some images, there are old scotch tape marks which look dark brown. Is there a way in which I can remove these marks in an automatic way ? Ideally I would record a script to automate the treatment

As Tacit already said, the short answer is "no" and now you know why retouching is a costly art. :)

That said, if the marks are away from any of the type or markings you want to preserve, you may well be able to write an action that simplifies the process. Manually select the toned areas and then execute an action that fills them with a pattern sampled from another area of the image. Some fine-tuning with opacity, blur, etc. might be needed but if all the pages are similar you could probably speed up the process quite a bit.

If you're going for a "perfect" look on pages that vary in tone and if the tape marks are close to type etc., it's going to be hand work. Sorry!

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"jm.almeras" wrote in message

Dear photoshop experts,

I have scanned old manuscripts dating from the 1920s and I am retouching them to try to restore their original state.

On some images, there are old scotch tape marks which look dark brown. Is there a way in which I can remove these marks in an automatic way ?

Ideally

I would record a script to automate the treatment

Thank you

Salut Jean Marie.

Look at your channels
I bet the brown mark does not exist in the red channel.
I had a batch of old B&W photos to restore last week and for a lot of them I just had to scan them RGB, highlight the red channel and change the mode to Grayscale.
Would that work for your manuscripts too?

Bonne chance

Stephan