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Someone handed me a number of terrible photos (2976×3968) of handwritten pages

  • the background is dark gray
  • the writing is not properly black
  • the writing is blurry and out of focus

to have their work graded by me but I have difficulties reading what is written if I fit one page to the width of my screen.

I cannot post a whole image because its size exceeds the maximum size allowed on SE sites and also due to privacy concerns, but I'm posting a smaller screenshot of a portion of one of these pages

enter image description here

what can I do to scale the images to the width of my screen and clean the problems on the way, from the command line? (I could clean up each photo in Gimp, but "I'd prefer not to")

Probably something with Imagemagick, but what, exactly?

Edit #1

In Gimp I'd play with the "Color Levels" adjusting the white point, with "Curves" to adjust the image gamma, and I'd try the "erode" plugin to recover a bit of line width.

Edit #2

XUbuntu installed in August

gboffi
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  • Maybe you could outline the steps you would need to take using Gimp to make this question easier to answer. That way, people know the exact way to achieve your goal using imagemagick or something else. Some examples would be contrast, brightness, resolution, greyscale, etc. or maybe use Gimp for one of the photos to achieve what you want and then outline those steps in your question. Just a suggestion. – mchid Aug 30 '20 at 20:16
  • How does this relate to Ubuntu? Please [edit] your question with details of your version number. – graham Aug 30 '20 at 20:17
  • @User24601 I think this relates to using software on Ubuntu which I believe is in the scope of on-topic questions. – mchid Aug 30 '20 at 20:18
  • Although, a version number might help as there are often differences in the availability and ability of software on different versions of Ubuntu. – mchid Aug 30 '20 at 20:22
  • Quite honestly, if this is a graded project, I would tell the student to submit better images. It seems that some of the writing is not even in the borders of the image. You can sharpen it with Gimp, but not anything out of the image. – Raffles Aug 30 '20 at 21:29
  • @Raffles The image I posted, as I specified in the question, is a detail of a 100% view of the original image, hence the words cut at the margins. Re submitting better images, alas this is impossible. – gboffi Aug 30 '20 at 21:45
  • Okay, this is completely off topic though, from one teacher to another, try to determine what the student intended by what you can see in the image. – Raffles Aug 30 '20 at 21:49
  • @raffles Thank you, I feel supported! Understand me, it's not completely unreadable, I can do it, I'm going to do it, it's just inconvenient and PCs are meant to mitigate inconveniences, aren't them? – gboffi Aug 31 '20 at 14:56

0 Answers0