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--- post_production_editing [2020/09/06 22:28] – hubz
+++ post_production_editing [2020/09/18 01:59] (current) – sadikyo
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-===== Post Production/Editing =====
+====== Post Production/Editing ======
 If you've already scanned using the guidelines and tutorials and have successfully preserved a RAW scan then you've already done a great service to the preservation community! However if you want to clean up and improve your images and release them in a non-RAW format we can give you a few tips here. This is by no means a perfect method, there are honestly no perfect methods with post production/editing of images because it will always need to be specifically tailored to whatever the desired image is intended for. But we can give some general advice here at the very least!
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 The right looks much better right? However as you might notice the process blurs the image slightly. This is an unfortunate side effect but still looks better than with the screen still there.
-So how do we descreen our images? Scanners usually have a hardware option for this when scanning but we DO NOT recommend this. For one it ruins our RAW image scans as it alters them, which is something we never want. The other options are via software and there is a very good plugin for Photoshop that does a good job with this called Sattva Descreen. Unfortunately it's not free and you'll need to buy it [[http://www.descreen.net/eng/soft/descreen/descreen.htm|here]]. The Home Edition is much cheaper than the Professional but if you can swing it we recommend the Professional for its additional features of the tuning of the Moiré reduction setting, the noise reduction can be useful too but sometimes it does more harm than good so it's not a major loss if you go with the Home edition.
+So how do we descreen our images? Scanners usually have a hardware option for this when scanning but we DO NOT recommend this. For one it ruins our RAW image scans as it alters them, which is something we never want. The other options are via software and there is a very good plugin for Photoshop that does a good job with this called Sattva Descreen. Unfortunately it's not free and you'll need to buy it [[http://www.descreen.net/eng/soft/descreen/descreen.htm|here]] if you decide to go to the trouble of descreening your images. The Home Edition is much cheaper than the Professional version and is suitable for our uses. Of course if you don't mind spending the money Professional's additional features of the tuning of the Moiré reduction setting and the noise reduction can be useful too. Though sometimes they can do more harm than good so it's not a major loss if you go with the Home edition.
+Once you've purchased and installed the plugin it's pretty straightforward to use. If you pull it up from Filter - Sattva - Descreen you'll see a window like this -
+{{:sattva.jpg?direct}}
+Usually the plugin will automatically detect the screen and descreen it for you. I recommend leaving Reduce a moire checked as well. Noise reduction if you go for the professional version can make your images look better but it can also blur out important details in my opinion and I usually leave it off unless I see noticeable improvement from it. Lastly you can also check Automatic and it will try to figure out the screen on it's own without your adjusting it with the "Screen, lines/inch" bar and it usually does quite a good job. If you click the grey box next to Screen, lines/inch it will try to detect the screen and adjust itself. This may be necessary when the section of the image it's showing doesn't have a screen it can pick up properly. So you may need to move it around by clicking and dragging on the image itself or zooming in or out with the + and - buttons in the lower left corner.
+Now here's the catch, a lot of scans have different frequencies of screens on them, especially manual and magazine pages I've noticed or at least the way Sattva detects them. I generally don't apply Sattva when it shows anything below 150 or 130 at the ABSOLUTE most. If you go lower than 150 you'll get some pretty bad blurring which can effect clarity of text quite a bit and I don't recommend it generally. One way to do this the most correct way is to draw selection boxes in Photoshop around sections that you know have screens on them and run the Sattva plugin on them either one at a time or in a batch. This helps you descreen images without blurring text. However this isn't always possible especially when text is on top of a screen section. It's also more time consuming as you'll be doing screens in chunks per image. 150-175 screen, lines/inch run across the entire image is safe if you don't want to mess with it and while it will blur your whole image slightly it's much better looking in my opinion than leaving the screens there. Generally when I am doing a large batch of manual or magazine pages I manually set it to 150 or 170 and record it in an "Actions" batch process and just live with the results. It will fail on some pages however and leave them open which can consume a lot of RAM if you're not careful so be sure to do it in small batches or have a computer with a large amount of RAM or you'll risk a computer locking up or Photoshop crashing. Not sure what an Actions batch process is? Let's move on to the next section and talk about it.
+===== Photoshop Actions / Batch Processing =====
+With scanning you're going to be doing A LOT of the same things to your images over and over again. Seems like a pain to manually do this doesn't it? Luckily with Photoshop (and other photo editing programs) we're able to use what's known as "Actions" that are repeatable things we do to our images we can record and "playback" against a batch of them to avoid having to manually do it to each and every image. It's a massive sanity and time saver and also takes out pesky human error. Again I am used to Photoshop so will only be going over how to do it in that. But if somebody wants to write up how they do it with other photo editing programs I can gladly add that as well.
+I'll go over two of my most used Action sets I use in Photoshop with my scans and how I create them. The first is a basic one that takes my RAW TIFF images from my scanner, applies my IT8 profile, and saves my images as a PNG. So how do we set this up?
+We're going to need to open an image file up that doesn't have anything done to it yet, just a RAW TIFF scan from our scanner and scanning software of choice. Now in Photoshop we need to make sure our Actions window is open so go to Window and select Actions. It should look something like this -
+{{:actions1.png?direct}}
+Along the bottom of this window you'll see six buttons you can click on, some are greyed out. First off lets create a new action set by clicking the folder icon and naming it "Scanning Actions". Next I want you to click on the icon directly to the right of the folder that looks like a piece of folded paper. This creates a new action so go ahead and click on it and name it "IT8 Profile Attach - Save PNG" as that's what we'll be doing in this action. I likely naming my actions with good descriptions as it makes them easier to reference later especially if you make a lot of them.
+{{:actions2.png?direct}}
+Now you'll notice we have to hit a button called Record to save our action. What this means is now EVERY thing we do to our image it is going to be recorded until we hit the stop button. You should notice that the record button is now lit up red along the bottom of the actions pane.
+{{:actions3.png?direct}}
+So let's go ahead and do what we want our action to do. I'm going to first attach my IT8 profile to this image. I scanned this image in Epson Scan in 24-bit so that is the profile I will select from Edit - Assign Profile. You however will have to do this with whatever IT8 profile you've created if you've created one at all. If you haven't created one just skip this step as you can't record something you can't do.
+{{:actions5.png?direct}}
+Now that's done, I want to save my image as a PNG instead of a TIFF due to the fact that it compresses better and is still lossless. So I'm going to go up to File - Save As - and then put the file in the folder where I want it to save and change my extension to PNG.
+{{:actions6.png?direct}}
+Now here's an important thing to note, if you choose to Save As and point it to a folder it will drop ALL images you run this Action against in the same folder so just keep that in mind. If you're wanting it to save or overwrite it the same folder as the image you're editing with an action you'll need to choose Save instead of Save As. Choose depending on what you want it to do.
+Lastly I don't want to leave the image open after I have saved my changes so I'll click File - Close it shouldn't ask for confirmation since we've saved the image changes already but if you are working with an image and you didn't save it it will prompt you for your response AND remember it, so that will also apply to whatever images you run your action against. Like i said it is recording EVERYTHING you are doing so just keep that in mind if you end up getting unexpected results from your actions.
+Now that our image is closed we want to stop recording anything further on this action. Click the Stop button at the bottom of your actions task bar to do this.
+{{:actions7.png?direct}}
+And with that we are done! Our action is successfully recorded and if you did it correctly it should look something like this.
+{{:actions8.png?direct}}
+You may have noticed the trashcan icon along the bottom of the bar on the far right as well. That let's us delete action sets, or just specific sections of the action if we messed up and recorded something we didn't want to. Simply highlight the action or section of the action you want gone and click the trashcan and and confirm it.
+Now that we've created an action how do we use it? Well for this case I commonly use this action to attach my IT8 profile and convert my TIFFs to images after I've scanned a large batch of them all at once. That way it will process them one by one and what I want done without me manually having to do it which saves time and also means I don't have to babysit the process and wait while each of my PNG files save as it takes awhile to save 1200DPI PNGs let me tell you. I can walk off and have a beer and come back and they'll all be done for me!
+So let's do just that, go up to File and Automate and then pick Batch.
+{{:actions9.png?direct}}
+Now you'll see a window like this -
+{{:actions10.png?direct}}
+You'll need to drop down your Set to the proper set and action to the proper action you want to run. Once you do this it will remember the last one you have selected. Next you'll want to choose a source, I'll commonly choose Open Files or Folder depending on my uses. For this action we'll probably just have all our RAW TIFF scans sitting in a folder so set it for Foulder and click Choose and browse to it. Next I recommend setting Destination as Save and Close, and lastly at the bottom change Errors to "Log Errors to File" and Save As make it somewhere on your computer. Otherwise anytime something goes wrong your actions will freeze up with errors as they go. With this if you run into issues it will wait until it's tried to process all actions on all files before notifying you there was a problem. This is useful when you're doing something like running Sattva Descreen against a large amount of images and it fails to detect it properly (which is quite often).
+After this just click OK and you should see your actions begin to run against your images. Come back after they're all done and see if they applied correctly to your images. That is how you setup a basic action, and honestly the sky is the limit with these things. I use them in all sorts of ways to automate stuff, so play around and experiment. I'll go over one more set I use quite often.
+Generally I do the same things with minor adjustments on my RAW images when I convert them to JPEGs. Again I NEVER DELETE MY RAW IMAGES, the JPEGs are just extra images I include along with RAWs as they're prettied up and their file sizes are much smaller making them easier to use.
+{{:actions11.png?direct}}
+That is my command above you can mimic if you like, or feel free to take just bits and pieces of it for ideas and adjust. For this batch of images I did two separate levels adjustments that I thought produced good results for the material I was scanning at the time. After that step as you can see I convert from my IT8 profile to SRGB as that will allow my image to display properly in programs that are unable to render IT8 Profiles (Which is a lot of them including web browsers). Next up I am running Sattva Descreen against them with Automatic settings. However as I noted this sometimes produces improper results if Sattva detects the screen incorrectly. So let's tell it what screen to try and detect. Just so you know you can click any adjustable action in your action set to adjust it manually and it will remember the settings you pick. This can be used in all sorts of ways naturally but for this case I'm going to double click the Descreen action step to adjust it.
+{{:actions12.jpg?direct}}
+I had Automatic checked previously so I've unchecked it, I then clicked the box to the right of "Screen, Lines/inch" along the top to have it detect the screen. It found one it it thinks it's 177 which looks good to me. BUT with Sattva I have to manually adjust it for it to record that it isn't an automatic settings. So I move the slider off 177 and then back on it. After that I'll hit OK and my image will begin to descreen and record my action with this new value. We can see if it worked by looking at our action now.
+{{:actions13.png?direct}}
+Instead of automatic it now knows I want to only descreen my images I run this action against at 177. If it is unable to find a screen at that it will leave the image open stop at this step, and move on to the next image in the batch. This is why I mentioned earlier it's a good idea to either have a machine with a lot of RAM or do smaller batches of images as when the Sattva step fails and it often can it will leave images open gobbling up resources. However it's a good thing as it lets us go in after the batch is over and try to manually set the screen properly or just skip the step entirely.
+Let's segue into that for a second.To skip a step on any action set you simply click the checkbox on the left side of the action and it will skip it if it's unchecked. You'll notice too that after doing this your Action's name will have a red checkmark next to it which signifies that you are skipping a step in this action. Just a nice visual reference in case you forget. If you click an action step when an image is open it will highlight and if you press the play button along the bottom bar it will start at that action step and continue on down, which is another useful thing to know.
+{{:actions14.png?direct}}
+Alright so our next step in that action set is to shrink the image size down to 600DPI. The one after that is an Unsharp Mask setting i do that sharpens the image up very slightly which can help with blurriness caused by resizing, it's a very faint adjustment as I don't want to get crazy with it especially when I'm running it against a batch of images that may be quite different from each other.
+Lastly I save my image as a JPEG and then close it. Again this action set saves me an incredible amount of time and the fact that I can adjust it on the fly for my uses and that it ALWAYS does the actions I tell it to allows me to cut down on human error in case I forget to resize my image, or convert it to SRGB etc.
+Action Sets are VERY powerful and I highly recommend experimenting and using them if you're going to do a lot of post production/editing. It just makes your life so much easier imo.