#ocr software

[kddicorporations]

An Introduction to OCR Tools

Optical Character Recognition software, or OCR software, are digital tools designed to process documents in various formats and convert the information into machine-readable text. From extracting texts from images to automating data entry, businesses are increasingly using these tools for several purposes these days.

[mashkaroom]

Translation thoughts on the greatest poem of our time, “His wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floor”

It’s actually quite tricky to translate. Because it’s so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. “Chintz” is a word with its own set of associations. Chintz is a type of fabric with its origins in India. The disparaging connotation is from chintz’s eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldn’t compete.

Keep it real” is tremendously difficult to translate -- it’s a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to one’s roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:

“[K]eeping it real meant performing an individual’s experience of being Black in the United States. As such, it became a form of resistance. Insisting on a different reality, one that wasn’t recognized by the dominant culture, empowered Black people to ‘forge a parallel system of meaning,’ according to cultural critic Mich Nyawalo...The phrase’s roots in racialized resistance, however, were erased when it was adopted by the mostly-White film world of the 1970s and ’80s....Keeping it real in this context indicated a performance done so well that audiences could forget it was a performance.This version of keeping it real wasn’t about testifying to personal experience; it was about inventing it.”

One has to imagine that jjbang8 did not have the origins of these phrases in mind when composing the poem, but even if by coincidence, the etymological and cultural journeys of these two central lexemes perfectly reflect the themes of the poem. The two words have themselves traveled away from the authenticity they once represented, and, in a new context, have taken on new meanings -- the hero of our poem, the unnamed “him”, is, presumably, in quite a similar situation.

Setting aside the question of register, of the phonology, prosody, and meter of the original, of the information that is transmitted through bits of grammar that don’t necessarily exist in other languages -- a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these -- how do you translate the journey of the words themselves?

In my translations, I decided to go for the most evocative words, even if they don’t evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that there’s more than just what you see, whether that’s the details of the story -- what’s happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? -- or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.

Yiddish first:

זייַן ווייַב האָט אָנגעפֿילט זייַן הויז מיט הבלים

צו בלייַבן וויטיש, איך שטוף אים אופֿן דיל. zayn vayb hot ongefilt zayn hoyz mit havolim.

tsu blaybn vitish, ikh shtup im afn dil

This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish -- tsits -- but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means “vanity, nothingness, nonsense, trifles”. In Hebrew, it can also mean breath or vapor. I chose this over the other competitors because it, too, is a word with a journey and with a secondary meaning. Rather than imagining the bright prints of chintz, we might imagine a more olfactory implication -- his wife has filled his house with perfumes or cleaning fluids. It can carry the implication that something is being masked as well as the associations with vanity and gaudiness.

Vitish -- Okay, this is a good one. Keep in mind, of course, that I’ve never heard or seen it used before today, so my understanding of its nuances is very limited, but I’ll explain to you exactly how I am sourcing its meaning. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CYED) gives this as “gone astray (esp. woman); slang correct, honest”. I used the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition software, which allows you to search for strings in their corpus, to confirm that both usages are, in fact, attested. It’s a pretty rare word in text, though, as the CYED implies, it might have been more common in spoken speech. It appears in a glossary in “Bay unds yuden” (Among Us Jews) as a thieves cant word, where it’s definted as נאַריש, שרעקעוודיק, אונבעהאלפ. אויך נישט גנביש. אין דער דייַטשער גאַונער-שפראַך --  witsch -- נאַריש, or “foolish, terrible, clumsy/pathetic. not of the thieves world. in the German thieves cant witsch means foolish”. A vitishe nekeyve (vitishe woman) is either a slacker or a prostitute. I can’t prove this for sure, but my sense is that it might come from the same root as vitz, joke (it’s used a couple of times in the corpus to mention laughing at a vitish remark -- which makes it seem kind of similar to witty). I assume the German thieve’s cant that’s being referred to is Rotwelsch, which has its own fascinating history and, in fact, incorporates a lot of Yiddish. In fact, for this reason, some of the first Yiddish linguists were actually criminologists! What an excellent set of associations, no? It has the slangy sense of straightforward of honest; it has a sense of sexual non-normativity (we might use it to read into the relationship between the narrator and the husband) -- and a feminized one at that; it was used by an underground subculture, and, again, the meaning there was quite different -- like the “real” in “keeping it real” it was used to indicate whether or not someone was “in” on the life (tho “real” is used to mean that the person is in, while “vitish” is used to mean they’re not). It’s variety of meanings are more ambiguous than “keep it real”, which can pretty much only be read positively, and it also brings in a tinge of criminality. Though it doesn’t have the same exact connotations as “keep it real”, I think it’s about as ideal of a fit as we’ll get because it’s equally evocative of more below the surface. I also chose “tsu blaybn vitish”, which is “to stay vitish”, as opposed to something like “to make it vitish” to keep the slight ambiguity of time that “keep it real” has -- keeping it real does< I think, imply that there is a pre-existing “real” to which one can adhere, so I wanted to imply the same.

The rest is straight-forward. “Shtup” is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for “fuck”, and I think it has a nice sound.

Ok, now Russian

женой твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками

чтоб не блудить с пути, ебемся на полу

zhenoy tvoy dom napolnin fintiflyushkami.

shtob ne bludit’ s puti’, yebyomsya na polu

In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here -- since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, it’s harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:

“Your house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, we’re fucking on the floor”

So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for “chintz” and “keep it real”. To preserve the iamb, I changed “his” to “your”. This changes the lines from a narration of events to some outside party to a conversation between the two men at the center. Russian also has both formal and informal you (formal you is also the plural form, as is the case in a number of other languages). I went with informal you because I wanted to preserve the fact that his wife has filled his house not their house, as someone pointed out in the original chain (though I don’t think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because it’s unlikely you’d be on formal you with someone you’re fucking (unless it’s, like, a kink thing). I honestly didn’t even consider making it formal, but that would actually raise a lot of interesting implications about the relationship between the speaker and the husband, as well as with what that means about the “realness” of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth -- that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that he’s betraying -- is obscured? that this intimacy is just a facade? Is there perhaps some sort of power differential that the narrator wishes to point out? Or perhaps is the way that the narrator is keeping it real by pointing out the distance between the two of them? there is no pretense of intimacy, the narrator is calling this what it is -- an encounter without deeper significance?

Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history --  i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only “his house” and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also don’t know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you. 

Ok moving on, I originally translated it as “твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками жены”. Honestly, this sounds more elegant than what I have now, but I ultimately though removing the wife from either a subject or agent position (grammatically, I mean) was too big a betrayal of the original. The original judges the wife. She took an active role in filling the house. If she were made passive, that read is certainly a possible one -- perhaps even the dominant one -- but it could also read more like “we are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they share” -- the action of filling is no longer what’s being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because it’s almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. “Zhenoy tvoy dom napolnen” is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means “Your house is filled by your wife” -- as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps that’s even good -- we focus, for good reason, on the relationship between the two men, but in a translation, the wife is able to draw more attention to herself.

Ok, chintz: I chose the word “финтифлюшки” (fintiflyushki), meaning trifle/bobble/tchotchke, because it, allegedly, comes from the german phrase finten und flausen, meaning illusions and vanity/nonsense. Once again, I like that the word has a journey, specifically a cross-linguistic one.

Keep it real: this one, frankly, fails to capture the impact of the original, in my opinion, but allow me to explain the reasoning. “Stray off the path” implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz -- and one they intend to continue taking, one that this act is a maintenance of. It brings in a little irony, since the husband very much is straying from the path of his marriage. “Bludit’“ can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can “stray”). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch -- they want to do the latter but not the former.

As for register -- “shtob” is a bit informal. I would write the full version (shto by) in an email, for example. The word for fuck, yebyomsa, is from one of the “mat” words, the extra special top tier of russian swears, definitely not to be said in polite company (and, if you are a man of a certain generation or background, not in front of women; it’s not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if we’re already thinking that deeply about it. But while we’re on the topic, i will say that in my circles in the US, women use mat much more actively than men (at least in front of me, who was, up until recently, a woman and also a child).)

Ok i think that’s all the comments i have!

[jorisjurgen]

ypou wouldnt last an hour in the asylim i put myself in

[algodocs]

Extracting data from purchase orders can be a tedious and error-prone process, especially when dealing with a high volume of documents. Manual extraction methods are often inefficient and costly.

However, with AlgoDocs Purchase Order AI OCR app, you can seamlessly automate this process. Our advanced technology accurately extracts essential details such as purchase order numbers, dates, item descriptions, shipping addresses, costs, and more. This automation saves you valuable time and resources, allowing you to focus on other critical tasks. To learn more about how AlgoDocs can revolutionize your purchase order data extraction with AI, read our comprehensive guide.

[devangriai]

Use Cases of OCR Translation. Which is the best Image to Text Converter Online?

Learn How Optical Character Recognition Can Make a Difference Discover how OCR with enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and automation is transforming finance, healthcare, logistics, and much more.

OCR Translation helps to read and transform the printed, written, or scribbled characters. The computer alters the image content into machine-encoded texts. This is a subcategory of image recognition. The character recognition application converts a digitized or scanned material into a written document.

In this in-depth write-up, we explore OCR use cases and the uses of OCR Translation technology and common and industry-specific applications that highlight the importance of text extraction. OCR APIs were developed to transcribe text coming from handwritten documents for better interpretation by machines. There are now increasing applications being used across industries.

There are common applications of OCR Translation such as:

Extracting text from scanned documents for digital archiving

Text recognition for images to automate data entry.

Convert readable PDFs into writable formats.

Increase accessibility by converting printed text into digital text for screen readers.

OCR technology improves data accuracy, manages workflows, and increases industry productivity.

 

Common Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applications and use cases

1. Invoice processing

Data extraction: Retrieves invoice numbers, vendor information, amounts, and dates to ensure precise and error-free data capture.

Efficiency boost: It enhances overall efficiency in managing documents through ease of handling and organizing large volumes of documents.

Knowledge management: It assists the organization in better management and exploiting its knowledge assets.

2. Document digitization

Physical to digital conversion: Image to Text Converter Online is used to convert paper-based documents to digital, thus making their handling and storage easier.

Easy access: Makes historic records, contracts, and legal papers easily traceable; hence, access to information will be faster.

Storage needs: It reduces the use of physical storage space contributes to less clutter and saves on the cost of storage.

3. Recover information from forms

Automatic processing of forms: Assists in gathering information fast and accurately through form processing using registration documents, application forms, and survey forms.

Environmental impact: It applies in reducing paper usage toward achieving sustainability since it reduces the carbon footprint of any organization.

Saving time: This accelerates the data entry processes that enable the applications and forms to be processed fast.

Applications in industry: It is useful for the intake forms of patients in hospitals, loan applications in banks, and all application procedures in government offices.

Error Reduction: It greatly diminishes the likelihood of data entry errors. More accurate records are ensured.

4. Making documents searchable

Text scanning: Scanned images and documents are made into searchable text for ease of retrieval.

Improved retrieval: The process improves the location of specific information in big text repositories, saving time and effort.

Documentation management: Organizing files and retrieval in virtual archives enhances efficiency in a firm's operational activities.

OCR Translation technology has enormous potential in all industries. We discussed how OCR enhances data management. Automated digitized documents and invoice processing extract data to enhance document searchability and different forms of image content. 

Organizations can perform data entry from printed papers or data records using OCR as input, including passports, portfolios, financial records, sales receipts, and business cards. 

[piazzaconsultinggroup]

OCR Technology Software Services - Piazza Consulting Group

Unlock the full potential of your documents with our cutting-edge Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. At Piazza Consulting Group, we specialize in transforming your paper-based and digital documents into actionable data, enhancing efficiency and accuracy across your organization.

Why Choose Our OCR Technology Software Services?

High Accuracy and Precision Our OCR solutions are designed to deliver exceptional accuracy, ensuring that every detail of your documents is captured and processed correctly. With advanced algorithms and machine learning, our technology minimizes errors and maximizes data integrity.

Versatile Document Handling Whether you have invoices, receipts, contracts, or handwritten notes, our OCR software can handle a wide range of document types. It recognizes and processes various fonts, languages, and formats, making it a versatile tool for all your document needs.

Seamless Integration Our OCR technology seamlessly integrates with your existing systems, enabling smooth data flow and easy implementation. We work with your IT team to ensure a hassle-free integration process, so you can start benefiting from our services immediately.

Enhanced Productivity Automate data entry and reduce manual processing time with our OCR solutions. By converting documents into searchable and editable formats, you can streamline your workflows, improve productivity, and focus on more strategic tasks.

Secure and Compliant Security is our top priority. Our OCR software complies with industry standards and regulations, ensuring that your data is protected throughout the processing cycle. We implement robust security measures to safeguard your sensitive information.

Our OCR Technology Services Include:

Document Digitization Convert your physical documents into digital formats for easy storage, retrieval, and sharing. Our OCR technology ensures that all information is accurately captured and preserved.

Data Extraction Extract key data points from your documents, such as names, dates, and amounts, and populate your databases automatically. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and reduces the risk of errors.

Text Recognition Recognize and convert printed and handwritten text into editable formats. Our OCR software can handle various text styles and complexities, ensuring comprehensive text recognition.

Image to Text Conversion Convert images containing text into machine-readable text. Our OCR technology processes images from different sources, such as scanned documents and photographs, to extract valuable information.

Searchable PDF Creation Create searchable PDFs from scanned documents, allowing you to quickly locate and retrieve information. Our OCR software adds a layer of searchability to your PDFs, enhancing document management.

How It Works:

Document Submission Submit your documents through our secure portal. Our OCR software begins processing them immediately.

Data Extraction and Conversion Our advanced algorithms extract and convert text from your documents, ensuring high accuracy and precision.

Integration and Output The processed data is integrated into your systems or delivered in your preferred format, ready for use.

Review and Quality Assurance We conduct a thorough review to ensure the highest quality and accuracy of the processed data.

Get Started with Piazza Consulting Group

Transform your document management processes with our state-of-the-art OCR technology. Contact Piazza Consulting Group today to learn more about our OCR software services and how we can help your organization achieve greater efficiency and accuracy.

Contact Us:

United States

115 W. Century Road Suite 130 Paramus, NJ 07652 India p.No-9./1, opp. It Raheja Park, Sector 3, HUDA Techno Enclave, HITEC City, Hyderabad, Telangana 500081, India

info@pcongrp.com

877-317-1680

https://www.linkedin.com/company/piazzaconsulting

[saggiosguardo]

Scaricate ora un OCR per macOS molto utile, gratuito solo per oggi

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[intellitechdataservices]

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[ghostrockband]

Cki engineers are like: we've created a software that reads cards worse than ever before

[dentixvoxel]

looking into various optical character recognition software and stuff because whilst i do geniuenly like manually retyping japanese and looking up kanji I don't know, it's gonna take me 50 years to transcribe one volume lmao

[meontechnologies]

Speed and Accuracy Unite: Embrace Meon Technologies' OCR Solutions

Meon Technologies has undoubtedly established itself as a leader in the OCR industry, providing businesses with powerful tools to unlock the full potential of their data. Their advanced OCR software enables businesses to boost efficiency, accuracy, and productivity, ultimately leading to better decision-making and improved customer experiences. As technology continues to evolve, Meon Technologies remains at the forefront of innovation, driving businesses towards a more digitized and data-driven future.

[arcdocumentsolutions]

A Guide to Choosing the Best Document Management Software

In today's digital age, businesses are increasingly relying on document management software to streamline their workflow, increase productivity, and reduce costs. With so many options available, it can be overwhelming to choose the best one for your organization. Here is a guide on how to choose the best document management software for your business.

Assess Your Needs: Before you start looking for document management software, identify what you need it to do.

Consider User-Friendliness: The best document management software should be user-friendly and easy to navigate.

Look for Integration Capabilities: This will save you time and increase efficiency, allowing you to work across multiple platforms seamlessly.

Check Security Features: Ensure that the document management software you choose has robust security features, such as encryption, access control, and audit trails.

Consider the Price: It's crucial to understand the pricing structure and evaluate whether the software's benefits justify the cost.

Read Reviews and Ask for Recommendations: Do your research and read reviews from other businesses that have used the software you're considering.

Choosing the best document management software for your organization is crucial in streamlining your workflow, increasing productivity, and reducing costs.

[askablindperson]

In what way does alt text serve as an accessibility tool for blind people? Do you use text to speech? I'm having trouble imagining that. I suppose I'm in general not understanding how a blind person might use Tumblr, but I'm particularly interested in the function of alt text.

In short, yes. We use text to speech (among other access technology like braille displays) very frequently to navigate online spaces. Text to speech software specifically designed for blind people are called screen readers, and when use on computers, they enable us to navigate the entire interface using the keyboard instead of the mouse And hear everything on screen, as long as those things are accessible. The same applies for touchscreens on smart phones and tablets, just instead of using keyboard commands, it alters the way touch affect the screen so we hear what we touch before anything actually gets activated. That part is hard to explain via text, but you should be able to find many videos online of blind people demonstrating how they use their phones.

As you may be able to guess, images are not exactly going to be accessible for text to speech software. Blindness screen readers are getting better and better at incorporating OCR (optical character recognition) software to help pick up text in images, and rudimentary AI driven Image descriptions, but they are still nowhere near enough for us to get an accurate understanding of what is in an image the majority of the time without a human made description.

Now I’m not exactly a programmer so the terminology I use might get kind of wonky here, but when you use the alt text feature, the text you write as an image description effectively gets sort of embedded onto the image itself. That way, when a screen reader lands on that image, Instead of having to employ artificial intelligences to make mediocre guesses, it will read out exactly the text you wrote in the alt text section.

Not only that, but the majority of blind people are not completely blind, and usually still have at least some amount of residual vision. So there are many blind people who may not have access to a screen reader, but who may struggle to visually interpret what is in an image without being able to click the alt text button and read a description. Plus, it benefits folks with visual processing disorders as well, where their visual acuity might be fine, but their brain’s ability to interpret what they are seeing is not. Being able to click the alt text icon in the corner of an image and read a text description Can help that person better interpret what they are seeing in the image, too.

Granted, in most cases, typing out an image description in the body of the post instead of in the alt text section often works just as well, so that is also an option. But there are many other posts in my image descriptions tag that go over the pros and cons of that, so I won’t digress into it here.

Utilizing alt text or any kind of image description on all of your social media posts that contain images is single-handedly one of the simplest and most effective things you can do to directly help blind people, even if you don’t know any blind people, and even if you think no blind people would be following you. There are more of us than you might think, and we have just as many varied interests and hobbies and beliefs as everyone else, so where there are people, there will also be blind people. We don’t only hang out in spaces to talk exclusively about blindness, we also hang out in fashion Facebook groups and tech subreddits and political Twitter hashtags and gaming related discord servers and on and on and on. Even if you don’t think a blind person would follow you, You can’t know that for sure, and adding image descriptions is one of the most effective ways to accommodate us even if you don’t know we’re there.

I hope this helps give you a clearer understanding of just how important alt text and image descriptions as a whole are for blind accessibility, and how we make use of those tools when they are available.

[empty-movement]

May I ask what scanners / equipment / software you're using in the utena art book project? I'm an artist and half the reason I rarely do traditional art is because I'm never happy with the artwork after it's scanned in. But the level of detail even in the blacks of Utena's uniform were all captured so beautifully! And even the very light colors are showing up so well! I'd love to know how you manage!

You know what's really fun? This used to be something you put in your site information section, the software and tools used! Not something that's as normal anymore, but let's give it a go, sorry it's long because I don't know what's new information and what's not! Herein: VANNA'S 'THIS IS AS SPECIFIC AS MY BREAK IS LONG' GUIDE/AIMLESS UNEDITED RAMBLE ABOUT SCANNING IMAGES

Scanning: Modern scanners, by and large, are shit for this. The audience for scanning has narrowed to business and work from home applications that favor text OCR, speed, and efficiency over archiving and scanning of photos and other such visual media. It makes sense--there was a time when scanning your family photographs and such was a popular expected use of a scanner, but these days, the presumption is anything like that is already digital--what would you need the scanner to do that for? The scanner I used for this project is the same one I have been using for *checks notes* a decade now. I use an Epson Perfection V500. Because it is explicitly intended to be a photo scanner, it does threebthings that at this point, you will pay a niche user premium for in a scanner: extremely high DPI (dots per inch), extremely wide color range, and true lossless raws (BMP/TIFF.) I scan low quality print media at 600dpi, high quality print media at 1200 dpi, and this artbook I scanned at 2400 dpi. This is obscene and results in files that are entire GB in size, but for my purposes and my approach, the largest, clearest, rawest copy of whatever I'm scanning is my goal. I don't rely on the scanner to do any post-processing. (At these sizes, the post-processing capacity of the scanner is rendered moot, anyway.) I will replace this scanner when it breaks by buying another identical one if I can find it. I have dropped, disassembled to clean, and abused this thing for a decade and I can't believe it still tolerates my shit. The trade off? Only a couple of my computers will run the ancient capture software right. LMAO. I spent a good week investigating scanners because of the insane Newtype project on my backburner, and the quality available to me now in a scanner is so depleted without spending over a thousand on one, that I'd probably just spin up a computer with Windows 7 on it just to use this one. That's how much of a difference the decade has made in what scanners do and why. (Enshittification attacks! Yes, there are multiple consumer computer products that have actually declined in quality over the last decade.)

Post-processing: Photoshop. Sorry. I have been using Photoshop for literally decades now, it's the demon I know. While CSP is absolutely probably the better piece of software for most uses (art,) Photoshop is...well it's in the name. In all likelihood though, CSP can do all these things, and is a better product to give money to. I just don't know how. NOTENOTENOTE: Anywhere I discuss descreening and print moire I am specifically talking about how to clean up *printed media.* If you are scanning your own painting, this will not be a problem, but everything else about this advice will stand! The first thing you do with a 2400 dpi scan of Utena and Anthy hugging? Well, you open it in Photoshop, which you may or may not have paid for. Then you use a third party developer's plug-in to Descreen the image. I use Sattva. Now this may or may not be what you want in archiving!!! If fidelity to the original scan is the point, you may pass on this part--you are trying to preserve the print screen, moire, half-tones, and other ways print media tricks the eye. If you're me, this tool helps translate the raw scan of the printed dots on the page into the smooth color image you see in person. From there, the vast majority of your efforts will boil down to the following Photoshop tools: Levels/Curves, Color Balance, and Selective Color. Dust and Scratches, Median, Blur, and Remove Noise will also be close friends of the printed page to digital format archiver. Once you're happy with the broad strokes, you can start cropping and sizing it down to something reasonable. If you are dealing with lots of images with the same needs, like when I've scanned doujinshi pages, you can often streamline a lot of this using Photoshop Actions.

My blacks and whites are coming out so vivid this time because I do all color post-processing in Photoshop after the fact, after a descreen tool has been used to translate the dot matrix colors to solids they're intended to portray--in my experience trying to color correct for dark and light colors is a hot mess until that process is done, because Photoshop sees the full range of the dots on the image and the colors they comprise, instead of actually blending them into their intended shades. I don't correct the levels until I've descreened to some extent.

As you can see, the print pattern contains the information of the original painting, but if you try to correct the blacks and whites, you'll get a janky mess. *Then* you change the Levels:

If you've ever edited audio, then dealing with photo Levels and Curves will be familiar to you! A well cut and cleaned piece of audio will not cut off the highs and lows, but also will make sure it uses the full range available to it. Modern scanners are trying to do this all for you, so they blow out the colors and increase the brightness and contrast significantly, because solid blacks and solid whites are often the entire thing you're aiming for--document scanning, basically. This is like when audio is made so loud details at the high and low get cut off. Boo.

What I get instead is as much detail as possible, but also at a volume that needs correcting:

Cutting off the unused color ranges (in this case it's all dark), you get the best chance of capturing the original black and white range:

In some cases, I edit beyond this--for doujinshi scans, I aim for solid blacks and whites, because I need the file sizes to be normal and can't spend gigs of space on dust. For accuracy though, this is where I'd generally stop.

For scanning artwork, the major factor here that may be fucking up your game? Yep. The scanner. Modern scanners are like cheap microphones that blow out the audio, when what you want is the ancient microphone that captures your cat farting in the next room over. While you can compensate A LOT in Photoshop and bring out blacks and whites that scanners fuck up, at the end of the day, what's probably stopping you up is that you want to use your scanner for something scanners are no longer designed to do well. If you aren't crazy like me and likely to get a vintage scanner for this purpose, keep in mind that what you are looking for is specifically *a photo scanner.* These are the ones designed to capture the most range, and at the highest DPI. It will be a flatbed. Don't waste your time with anything else.

Hot tip: if you aren't scanning often, look into your local library or photo processing store. They will have access to modern scanners that specialize in the same priorities I've listed here, and many will scan to your specifications (high dpi, lossless.)

Ahem. I hope that helps, and or was interesting to someone!!!

[illym]

Bridget is so damn cute here. So is Axl.

ID in alt text

Cleaned & original comics under the cut, along with my pains translating.

Why are they all slanted........ Or maybe I'm just bonkers. I tried fixing this one, but I think it's even worse now. I'm giving up. This one posted itself when I was adding an extra screenshot... What a shockingly painful comic.

Anyway, you see that character there, in the fourth panel?

This character took me like two weeks to find. Holy crap. I first saw it in a different comics title. No OCR reader could pick it up, none of my friends who know Japanese characters could figure out what it was... I was starting to wonder if it was the author's personal created character [ like when someone in English says 'fantabulous' or something else, where it's only really understood by someone who can pick up context clues ] and would make the comic untranslatable, but then I saw it here AGAIN.

I knew they were different authors, so it was obviously a character that should be commonly known enough to be known by character recognition software. But I tried three different OCRs, all of my friends...

Finally, I went ahead and asked a friend of a friend's grandmother (native born Japanese) to please tell me what the character was. She did (and also translated the sentences I gave to her as examples of its usage which was extremely kind of her). The character is...

[ ロ ]. [ ロ ].

Ro.

They look completely different. Man if it wasn't satisfying to finally figure out. Actually, looking at the stroke order on wikipedia, I can see how the version in the comic came to be... But man if it isn't still evil.

As always, if you understand Japanese and want to retranslate this comic, feel free to send me a message with the new translation and I'll update it and credit you.

Also, Axl is saying [ あだだだ ] in the second panel, but I can't figure out what it means.