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I have photographed some pages of a book for reading. This is much faster than scanning and you don't have to carry the heavy books. However, the photographed books are not as nice: curved, skewed, and shadowed, as opposed to the much flatter, cleaner scanned books. Especially when you're trying to print them out.

Google's used some specific technique of converting books to e-books with a camera and a laser overlay.

But is there any home user software that can flatten a curled photographed book photograph?

Or maybe there is some technique which you can use in Photoshop?

What is the best way to achieve that?


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Realise you've answered the question yourself, but do you have an example image I could try photoshopping into shape? –  OGHaza May 9 at 10:07
I've answered meanwhile when I was looking for some softwares, but it failed. Unpaper generated worse output than I would manually do Auto Levels and decrease Saturation. –  kenorb May 9 at 10:15
I've tried PS, but using Perspective Crop you can't create custom shapes. –  kenorb May 9 at 10:23
I've posted some example, but I'm more interested in some general available methods rather than doing it only for specific images. –  kenorb May 9 at 10:26
Riiight, I see what you mean, something that will do it automatically/with minimal input rather than techniques you could apply to each image 1 by 1. –  OGHaza May 9 at 10:36

1 Answer 1

Some softwares which I've found so far:

  • Unpaper [cmd-line tool, Cross-Platform]

    Post-processing tool for scanned sheets of paper, especially for book pages that have been scanned from previously created photocopies. The main purpose is to make scanned book pages better readable on screen after conversion to PDF. Additionally, unpaper might be useful to enhance the quality of scanned pages before performing optical character recognition (OCR). unpaper tries to clean scanned images by removing dark edges that appeared through scanning or copying on areas outside the actual page content (e.g. dark areas between the left-hand-side and the right-hand-side of a double- sided book-page scan).

    OSX installation via Homebrew: brew install unpaper

  • Scan Tailor (GitHub) [Windows/OSX/Linux]

    Interactive post-processing tool for scanned pages. It performs operations such as page splitting, deskewing, adding/removing borders, and others.

    OSX installation via Homebrew: brew install scantailor

  • Book Scan Wizard [Java/Cross-Platform]

    A utility to help with Book scanning using cameras as a scanner. It will automate things such as cropping, rotating, fixing keystoning, fixing the DPI, and outputing it to tiff files that can be changed into PDF's or ebooks.

  • DIY Book Scanner Image Postprocessor

    An image postprocessor for the DIY Book Scanner described on instructables.com and DIY Book Scanner. Gets images ready for OCR or for PDF. Written in Java based on a partial port of the Leptonica image processing library.

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