Apple Preview showing lighter blocks where deletions were made

January 29, 2015 7:41 AM

Fixing some information in a scanned document. Screen shows a perfect seamless page but when printed the blocks I changed show up lighter. Is there some way I can fix this?
posted by ashtray elvis to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Is there any reason you can't convert to 1-bit color (eg: black/white)? This is frequently done with scanned documents for file-size and ease of OCR anyway, so it wouldn't look too unusual.
posted by Alterscape at 7:51 AM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

The background of the scanned documents is probably off-white. If you delete some off-white, you'll end up with pure white (no ink at all) which will be lighter. Alterscape's suggestion might fix this. Alternatively, you'll have to do something fancier like copy some of the background off-white and paste it into the blocks where you've deleted material, or delete all of the background using software like photoshop.

There might be settings in your scanner software to help with this as well (e.g. scan as black/white no grayscale).
posted by alms at 8:16 AM on January 29, 2015

Response by poster: Alterscape you were onto it! I was scanning in black and white but there was another option to scan in text. Worked perfectly. Perfect appearance now that it is printed.
Thank you for the helpful speedy response!
posted by ashtray elvis at 10:07 AM on January 29, 2015