Get Moire Out of Your Photos

Happy Mother’s Day!  I hope all my scrappy friends are enjoying a wonderful day of rest and relaxation with their families.  I have set aside today to spend some quality time with my scrapbooks and art journal while my husband and son work on setting up our above-ground pool for the summer.  I’m really looking forward to it, because other than my daily LOAD 513 pages, I haven’t done any personal scrapbooking in what feels like forever.

Speaking of LOAD 513 (which stands for Layout a Day, May 2013), I wanted to share with you a fun little page I did for Saturday’s prompt – “Lust”.  Boy was that a hard prompt to work with!  I puzzled over it all day and just couldn’t think of anything suitable to scrapbook along the theme of lust.  Greed, gluttony, sloth…yeah, I’ve got a ton of ideas for those, but not lust – not PG-rated anyway.  I was about to give up and just do a random page without the prompt when suddenly I had a brainstorm.  Actually it was more like a song storm.  One of those where a song gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out.  Well, this song happened to be Pink Floyd’s “Young Lust”.  Why that song happened to get stuck in my head, I do not know – the brain works in very mysterious ways – but as it so happens, I do have a story related to that song that made for a great scrapbook page.

Here is the photo I started out with.  You might notice that the photo is black and white, an odd size, and it kind of looks like it was a newspaper clipping.  That’s because it was.  One of our friends posted a scan of this newspaper clipping on Facebook a while back, and since it’s the only known photo of the ensemble group, I had to make it work. 

By the way, Facebook is a great source of photos when you don’t have any of your own.  While you’re in the photo browser, you can download a photo by clicking on the “Option” menu.  I’ve downloaded pictures from my high school years, my husband’s college years, and lots and lots of pictures of my son’s college life these past two years. I love it because I wouldn't have access to these photos otherwise.

Anyway, the point of this article was to share with you how I “fixed” the photo to use it on my layout.  Normally, when I have a newspaper or magazine article that I want to scan, I will use the “Descreen” feature on my scanner to help remove the moire patterns that are created during scanning of these kinds of images.  Unfortunately, there is no such filter in Photoshop to automatically remove the moire on an image that has already been saved, but, a quick search of the internet turned up this great tutorial which was easily adapted for my needs. 

In Photoshop, I increased the image’s resolution to 200% and then continued the tutuorial from there.  In each step, I used the maximum recommended setting.  Eventually, I wound up with a slightly odd shaped picture.  I adjusted the image size to top out at 6” wide at 300 ppi, and then increased the canvas size to a maximum 4” height.  This gave me a standard 4” x 6” print that I can have processed at my local photo printer. 

Is this the best possible technique?  Maybe not.  But if I have a choice between no photo, a poorly scanned newspaper clipping, or a fair photo created from the newspaper clipping, I will use this technique any day!

That's it for today.  Stay tuned later this week for our second Team L.I. Blog Hop.  Our theme for May is "May Flowers" and I've got some cool posts for you!