Image Processing Services

If you’ve already scanned your books or microfilm to digital files, we can make them better. Of course, Creekside Digital can also apply these processing options to scans we create for you from books or microfilm we digitize for you.

Black Border Removal / Deskew

Black Border Removal / Deskew -- Before & After

Often, raw images coming off of a scanner will be crooked, or “skewed,” and have black borders (“overscan”) showing around the edges of the original document scan. This wastes disk space by making the document files larger than they need to be, and reduces Optical Character Recognition accuracy. Creekside Digital can remove the black borders from around your scans and straighten the document at the same time, which results in smaller file sizes that will be processed more accurately by OCR. And yes, we can process grayscale and colors images, with absolutely no loss of quality! Our server-based software can process thousands of images per hour.

Geometric Curve Correction

When a bound book is digitized, the resulting scanned pages will have a certain degree of curvature to them where the pages meet in the book’s gutter – even when taking steps to minimize the effect such as using a V-shaped book cradle or glass plate to flatten the pages. To remove this distortion and maximize the accuracy of subsequent OCR processes, Creekside Digital uses cutting-edge algorithms to geometrically restore the original shape of the pages and the content they contain. We can implement this processing on scans of bound books as well as scans of microfilm containing images of bound books.

Geometric Curve Correction -- Before & After

Background Removal and Lighting Correction

Often, scans of bound works will have dark shadows present in the gutter area, due to excessive curvature or where lighting from the sides didn’t properly illuminate the entire page surface. Creekside Digital can identify and remove or minimize these shadows as well as other lighting problems such as hotspotting and glare / reflections from poorly placed illumination.

Bitonal Conversion / Downscaling / Format Shifting and Derivatives

If you don’t need all of your documents to be color or grayscale, or stored at the high resolution at which they were originally scanned, Creekside Digital can help! Our batch conversion services can process thousands of images an hour to quickly reduce color depth, decrease resolution, and shift file formats – resulting in smaller files which open faster and take up less disk space to store.

We can also create any required derivatives from your archival Digital Master files: for example, JPEG2000 lossy / lossless, downscaled searchable PDF, and XML structural metadata from your uncompressed TIFF master. Contact us for details.

PDF Compression

Using best-in-class technology from LuraTech, Creekside Digital can process your existing documents to reduce the size of your PDF files by 85% or more compared to standard PDF files. This processing results in smaller PDF files which take up less disk space, open faster, and work better on older PCs while retaining the details captured by grayscale images such as fine handwriting, rubber stamps, embossed seals, and photographs.