Cleaning Up Jpegs

I’m starting to convert the series of articles I did on notescript into a book. In the process, I need to clean up the images that accompanied the original article. When I first started, I thought it would be a piece of cake.

I was wrong.

This is an example of one of the images.

First, I left them as jpegs, did the cleanup, then saved the changes. Imagine my pleasure on re-opening a cleaned up image and finding all the noise right back in place.

That went well.

So I tried converting a file to a 24 bit bitmap and working with it. Hmm. My changes stay. But this is a lot of work.

What about converting it to a black and white bitmap? So I try that. Cool! ALL the noise is gone. But, so is half of the information that is needed.

That won’t work.

So finally I settled on converting the jpegs to 256 color bitmaps. This got rid of most of the noise. I then erased all individual pixels and saved the images as gifs. It seems to be the best compromise between a non-lossy format that is easy to work with. Boring, but easy.

Bimap:

Gif: 

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to this week and why you haven’t seen much writing from me.

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