New Life Games Tech Forums

I am trying to SCAN a payscale off of a slot glass - and print it - how do you brighten the background and brighten the colors lost thru scanning?   

I never had much luck with the contrast and saturation controls. They work over a limited range but if the original needs a lot of enhancement, things seem to go haywire. Can you backlight the glass to scan it? They never seem to scan right by reflected light. My scanner has that option - panels that light up in the lid.

What you might do otherwise is go to monochrome, do a "detect edges" operation to get the outlines and color it in manually.

On your top tool bar of Adobe 7.0 click on "Image" then "Adjustments" then select which you want to adjust.

i have tried using the various "adjustments" but they don't seem to work as I expect - example - changing the BRIGHTNESS does that - the white background is WHITER but the colors all FADE - ADJUSTING COLOR - doesn't seem to do that.  Tried the HUE too.   I developed software 20 years ago and wrote the documentation required for the users - this ADOBE software is written in jiberish.  Guess they are trying to get people to take classes - software is supposed to be USER friendly.

I found that the best way to get the colors to "pop" out at you was
to go right into the pixels with a shade lighter with the brush over all the pixels...
Once you get a small area the way you want it,
you use the clone brush over the rest of the portrait so the colors stay even.
it's very time consuming and difficult but the results are fantastic!

Small strip symbols are okay to do,
but I'm afraid it would take forever to do on an award or belly glass...

You might try saving the scan as a bitmap.  Then you can use other paint programs for the colors. 
You can then reconvert if necessary.  :89-

Try this.  Use a decent digital camera (10 Mpix should do fine).  Put it on a tripod and take a "fully framed" picture with no flash (zoomed in enough so that the entire glass is displayed) while in the machine and backlit.  You should get a pretty decent image that you can work off.  At this point you should have a properly exposed image that you can brighten with just changing the color saturation.  Make sure the room is dark and there's nothing reflected on the glass.

excellent idea - I did the scan like I said - brightning fixes the whites but really messes up the colors.

I have always used the "FILL" tool.
When doing whites, Select the pure white with the tool brush. Then depending on the color saturation on the slider, choose the fill tool and click on the area that you want pure white.
This works good for me. I do find it easier working in very large scale. Like 500%

In photoshop, you can select an area and perform operations on just that area.  One example would be to use the marque tool to select a rectangle, perform an adjustment (like levels), and just brighten that area.  Using this, you can go through your image and select an area with the same color, then brighten, or change the saturation to re-enhance the color.  Then save that change as a new layer, and proceed to the next area.  Hope this helps.
-Greg