BASAR Forum

Booklet pages often have solid colors as backgrounds. However due to the nature of printing and scanning, there can be a texture due to dust or wear. But the solid color can be transformed into a real solid color with no noise.

Here is the baseline image. The text has a black background. But when you look closely, there is noise from dust and texture.
Closer inspection
Use the Magic Wand to select the black area.
The selection should look something like this
The selection needs to be pulled back away from the edge of the font. Use Select > Grow/Shrink and use a negative number. This image is 800DPI, so -4 works well.
The selection will now look like this when zoomed in to the font.
There may be some cleanup needed afterwords. Change the Marquee (dashed rectangle) to add or subtract based on what you need to adjust. Subtract to remove areas you don't want to fill in.
It's also a good idea to remove the area near the spine/crease. That will be dealt with separately.
When the negative value (shrink) was used on the selection, it pulled it away from the edge of the page. We need to add that back. Change the Marquee to ADD and then outline the very edge to get back the couple of pixels around the edge.
Next use the Color Picker (Eye dropper) and set the radius to a number that will get a good average of the color to be filled.
That will add the color to the color tab
Add a new layer on top of the baseline image. Select the layer. Use the Flood Fill (Paint Bucket) to fill in the selection.
Hit escape key to clear the selection on the fill layer. Then click the Layer Effects button and apply a Gaussian Blur. This will blend in the solid color around the font. It will also make the color slightly pull back all around the edges. That can be fixed later using a seperate layer, so that the Gaussian Blur doesn't affect it.
The next part to clean up is the spine/crease. There is a hard edge between the solid fill and the original texture. Create a new layer on top of the fill layer. Select the paint brush. Set the Hardness to somewhere around 25-40%. This will affect how much the color fades towards the outside of the brush stroke.
Click the paintbrush at the top of the crease, slightly off to the side of the crease. Then scroll down to the bottom and hold the shift key and click at the bottom of the crease, slightly off to the side. This will stroke the paint brush in a straight line between the two point, which will follow the path of the crease. Giving a very nice natural looking color transition.
Now there should be a nice transition from the crease to the solid fill.
The last thing is the to make sure the edges of the page are still solid fill. Create a new layer. Click on one corner. Shift click around the 3 more corners.