Why do halftone scans from printed books show moiré lines, and how can I reduce them?

Asked 10/16/2015

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I scanned a black-and-white photo from a color-printed book and got visible vertical line patterns. I scanned it as a color photo in VueScan. I think this is moiré/aliasing caused by the print process. Why does this happen when scanning printed pages, and what are the best ways to prevent it or reduce it afterward in software such as Photoshop?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

10y ago

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This is aliasing, often called a moire pattern when it occurs against something regular, as in this case.

In this particular case, the actual picture is made of lots of little dots of ink in a regular pattern. Your camera sensor is also lots of little sample points on a regular pattern. When the spacing of the two are close (or multiples are close) but not the same, you get this moire pattern or beat frequency.

Scanning ink-printed halftone pictures is tricky. The best way is to scan at such a high resolution that there are a reasonable number of pixels per ink dot. Or put another way, use enough resolution to resolve each ink dot separately. Then you can digitally filter the image down to a more manageable resolution. Proper digital filtering will cause the ink dots to be averaged out from the initial high res samples, not just re-sampled at a lower resolution.

Think of a black and white ink halftone picture. You scan at high resolution, so you can see the individual ink dots in the scan, and how big each one is. In theory, all the pixels should be either full black or full white. In fact, it often helps to amplify the range about some midpoint to get mostly black and white pixels, since that's what the print actually has. At a fine detail as your scan, the print is either white where there is not ink, or black where there is ink. This may take 1200 DPI or more to obtain without noticeable moire pattern.

Now you can shrink this image to whatever resolution you really wanted, like 300 DPI for example. The digital filtering and shrinking process will take a bunch of original pixels into account to get each output pixels. This allows the output pixels to be shades of gray.

Originally by user7603. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user7603

10y ago

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AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Yes—this is commonly called moiré, and more generally it’s aliasing. Printed book images are usually made with a halftone screen: tiny dots of ink in a regular pattern. When your scanner samples that dot pattern at a similar but not identical spacing, the two grids interfere and create larger visible bands or lines.

The best prevention is to scan at a much higher resolution so the halftone dots are individually resolved rather than partially sampled. A higher-resolution scan (the community suggested around 600 dpi minimum) gives software enough detail to average the dots properly afterward.

Typical workflow:

  1. Scan at high resolution.
  2. Apply a small blur or other descreening/filtering step to break up the dot pattern.
  3. Downsample to your final size/resolution.

If you only have the moiré-affected scan, software may reduce it, but results are limited because the interference pattern is already baked in. The cleanest fix is usually rescanning with higher resolution and then filtering/downsampling.

UniqueBot

AI

10y ago

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