Any ideas on how to remove unwanted secions of images from a PDF

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D1984
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Any ideas on how to remove unwanted secions of images from a PDF

Post by D1984 » Fri Jul 01, 2022 9:58 pm

I was photographing (with a smartphone + computer and PDFing app) some pages from some old academic finance journals and said books were so old and beat up that they wouldn't properly have all their pages lay flat. Many times I had to use a pencil to hold the page down while I photographed it (else it wouldn't be flat and I wouldn't capture the whole page); as such, I have more than a few PDFS that clearly show the few inches of a pencil (the pointy part) holding the page down.

Does anyone here know if there is there any program (either free or not super expensive) that can do something like the Clone Stamp tool in Photoshop can do (i.e. simply clone some of the blank white page--well more like blank yellowed page as old as some of these journals were--in the image next to the pencil in the PDF and then paste/clone that over the pencil so it appears that there never was a pencil and I get a lot cleaner/nicer looking PDF) but that can do this with PDFs without first converting them to JPGs or PNGs and then converting them back to PDFs again? Thanks!
glennds
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Re: Any ideas on how to remove unwanted secions of images from a PDF

Post by glennds » Sat Jul 02, 2022 12:50 am

Since you know how to use Photoshop, why don't you just bring your PDF file into Photoshop, make the corrections, and then Save As PDF?
And if not Photoshop, I think most of the free image editors will import a PDF and provide some method of doing the same.

If that won't work for you, I seem to recall that you can draw a frame or box in Adobe Acrobat and fill with your color of choice, in your case it would be white. So the pencil image would be camouflaged under a white box or rectangle. Reader may not allow this functionality, you may need the full version of Acrobat.
D1984
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Re: Any ideas on how to remove unwanted secions of images from a PDF

Post by D1984 » Sat Jul 02, 2022 9:58 am

glennds wrote:
Sat Jul 02, 2022 12:50 am
Since you know how to use Photoshop, why don't you just bring your PDF file into Photoshop, make the corrections, and then Save As PDF?
And if not Photoshop, I think most of the free image editors will import a PDF and provide some method of doing the same.

If that won't work for you, I seem to recall that you can draw a frame or box in Adobe Acrobat and fill with your color of choice, in your case it would be white. So the pencil image would be camouflaged under a white box or rectangle. Reader may not allow this functionality, you may need the full version of Acrobat.
That's the problem....I don't currently have access to Photoshop. I only know how to use it because I used it at a former employer back in the late 2000s but even if I did know everything about how to use the current version I don't have it (whether as a program or as access to it via cloud access) on my computer. I don't know if the seven-day free trial is via the cloud or via an actual program but if it is via an actual program it would need to be for Linux and not Windows as I am not currently on a Windows machine.

As regards Acrobat Pro, perhaps it can do that but if so, there would then just be a big white rectangular box over where the pencil was.....that would still stick out against the faded yellowed color of the page (remember, these were scanned as images rather than simply as OCR'd text).
glennds
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Re: Any ideas on how to remove unwanted secions of images from a PDF

Post by glennds » Sat Jul 02, 2022 10:48 am

D1984 wrote:
Sat Jul 02, 2022 9:58 am


As regards Acrobat Pro, perhaps it can do that but if so, there would then just be a big white rectangular box over where the pencil was.....that would still stick out against the faded yellowed color of the page (remember, these were scanned as images rather than simply as OCR'd text).
Depending on the pdf editor (Acrobat Pro or an aftermarket), you should be able to sample the fill for the rectangle box off the faded yellowed page so it is a perfect or very close match.
If not, there are a ton of free photo editing apps for iOS and Android. I'm not up to speed on them because I use the Adobe ecosystem, but surely many of them will do clone stamping and healing. Ad hoc phone photo editing has come a long way and I'd be surprised if you can't import or convert a pdf scan.

Yet another option is to re-shoot (re-scan) your pages. When I was a photographer, we used DAP reusable putty to hold pages down instead of the pencil. Putty was our magic aid for all kinds of uses.
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Tyler
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Re: Any ideas on how to remove unwanted secions of images from a PDF

Post by Tyler » Sat Jul 02, 2022 1:17 pm

D1984 wrote:
Fri Jul 01, 2022 9:58 pm
Does anyone here know if there is there any program (either free or not super expensive) that can do something like the Clone Stamp tool in Photoshop
Try Gimp. It's a free, open-source alternative to Photoshop. And it includes a clone tool.
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Re: Any ideas on how to remove unwanted secions of images from a PDF

Post by D1984 » Mon Jul 04, 2022 12:59 am

Tyler, glennds,

Thanks for those tips! Using both Acrobat Pro (with its page crop/cropbox features and --in the few situations where cropping was untenable--print-screening the whole screen, pasting to Paint, copying into another Paint window the section of plain yellowed page needed to paste over the pencil, saving it, and then importing into Acrobat Pro as an image and moving it to the appropriate spot) and Gimp (by using the clone tool--which once I figured out how to get it to paste onto a given layer rather than as a totally separate layer--which was spot-on what I was looking for) I was able to accomplish exactly what I was trying to do.

Thanks again to both of you; the help was much appreciated.
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