I'm quite new to cleaning scans so maybe someone can help me out here. This image got the "scanning_artifacts" tag. Does this refer to the vertical line noise which is most obviously visible in the sunflowers, and visible to a lesser extent in Maho's eyes and the ball? It seems I can remove that just by making another pass with Neat Image. Or is there something else that needs fixing?

Hi, LoliPush, thanks for uploading.

From a quick glance I think the filtering was overdone, did you use a lot of blur before using Neat Image?

Did you try any suggestions from forum #10739

If you can upload the raw scan somewhere I can see what can be done to help improve results.

Thanks for the response.

My usual approach is to use GREYCstoration and a Photoshop surface blur before apply Neat Image and then a Unsharpen Mask 2. I tend to blur quite heavily then clean up the remaining noise with Neat Image afterwards, before sharpening. Perhaps this is the wrong approach.

I have read through various forum threads and tried to take in as much advice as possible. However, there are so many filters, settings, types of noise... and all this information is distributed across a lot of forum threads, many of them filled with posts that aren't useful. It's difficult for someone with only a basic knowledge of digital imagery to get started. I figured that rather than just reading, I'd learn more by experimenting by myself and taking note of any criticism my uploads receive.

Last time I saw a raw scan get uploaded here it was simply deleted (without being replaced). If could tell me of a convenient place to upload I'll do so. That said, I have a couple hundred raw scans here and ultimately I think I need to be cleaning them myself.

Moving forward scans tagged raw_scan shouldn't be deleted.

Someday (I hope) we'll organize the data bit better, maybe with screencasts instead, sorry for the hassle.

Personally, I use generic actions in Photoshop that produces pretty good results, I've uploaded it ( https://yande.re/300dpi.atn and https://yande.re/module.atn ) The action I use the most is AM high quality.

Others might weigh in to this, but longer conversations we usually move to IRC, makes it easier to have real time communications.

Yeah your upload is rather blurry. Basically you should try to retain as much detail as possible, specifically all the outlines of your figure. Just make sure you attempt to use masks for dark areas and light areas because in the end, those mask can be easily altered. You can use Petopeto's tut for some help. I've always used that but of course now i've branched out to fit my own style, but for anyone beginning that tutorial will be quite sufficient. To sum here here's my thoughts:

• Your filtering is too strong, thus it's blurry. This killed your details for basically everything. The rose pattern on her bikini, the sunflower seeds on the sunflowers. Though your filter was strong, you didn't remove scanning noise which is also why your sunflower still has those patterns.
• You should add some more filters to clear up and smooth up surfaces like the eyes.
• Your image don't particular have any complex detail such as laces or a veil or whatever. But if you have those, you should work particular hard to retain those detail. You can simply add a mask and set your strength of you eraser to a low value like 30% and erase till you get to a point where it is polished but not horridly unfiltered. This works for anythings else too.
• Scanning at high DPI and lowering it will help you remove get rid of some scanning noise, such as some morie. Don't use any preset scanning filters from your scanning program too, you want it as raw as possible for you to edit.
• I didn't find much use for the magic wand tool till I started filtering scans, this helps quite a bunch. But of course my method is methodical and time consuming. Wand, Strong GreyC filtering setting, repeat. I use this method for all those strong paper texture, but i set the iteration and spartial step to 2-3 & 3-4. Very good at clearing up textures. Better that just setting your guassian blur high.

uploaded proper actions, please try them out

admin2 said:
Moving forward scans tagged raw_scan shouldn't be deleted.

Make sure it's a tag only a mod can use as it will be abused.

Thank you both. I'll try to consider the advice given and practice some more.

I'm afraid the actions aren't very useful to me because I have no idea in what situations to apply them. Studying the way those actions select areas to apply filters to was somewhat educational at least. FYI, the "AM high quality" action uses a "color adjust" sub-action in the last step which isn't included in either of those action files.

It seems I have a lot more to learn than I thought, so rather than waste more of your time by asking for more help, I think it's probably best if I spend some more time trying things out for myself and deciding how much time I'm actually willing/able to put into this. Thanks again.

The color adjust is used to adjust saturation of midzki's scan I believe, so just don't check it.