Strategy to "optimize" photos of the documents post-import...?

DEVONthink
1

hello dear community,

I have the following use case:

  • I have lots of photos taken with my phone of various printed documents.
  • These have been copied to the DEVONthink.
  • most of these photos of the docs are not 1) cropped properly, 2) have shadow from the hand, or some reflections etc. 3) these are heic and not pdfs

Q: is there some way to improve readibility of these photos in DEVONthink directly…? Generally, I use SwiftScan app on my iPhone to make scans of the documents. But these photos are already imported.

How would you approach this problem?

thanks!

2

What do you want to do with the photos? I assume (!) that you want them converted to PDFs and OCRd – so, did you try to do that?

If you do not want PDFs, I’d suggest using a program like GraphicConverter, PhotoShop or Affinity Photo.

3

Hi @chrillek ,

So heic document does not offer an “OCR” option directly.

Instead I:

  1. Converted it into a pdf (Convert → To PDF (one page)
  2. Run OCR on the newly created PDF from the step (1)

So the result (visually): is a PDF which looks identically to the original heic photo. But it’s much lower in size (which is good), and I can select (and search) the text on that PDF (which is also good).

I wonder, however, if there is anything I can do directly in DEVONthink to “fix” the document visually…? Lots of phone scanner apps have some “black & white” filters which can be applied to the photos, so they look more like proper scans.

If there is nothing I can do directly in DEVONthink, what could be an easy solution to do that outside of DT?

4

Double-click the image in the view/edit pane to access some image controls.

2 Likes
5

thanks! that’s a new one!

I’ve played with some settings there, managed to make an image slightly better, but still not quite as what I’m looking for.

I guess in the future I’ll have to fix the images in one of the “scanner” apps on my phone before importing…

1 Like
6

DEVONthink does many things, but image editing is not one of its strengths. It offers a few basic tools from some macOS framework if you double-click the image as BLUEFROG says.

You could try adjusting exposure and contrast before converting to PDF, but I imagine you’re better off using specialized image/scanning software. Many of the iOS scanner apps can import and process existing photos, for example. I’m sure there are similar solutions on mac if you don’t want to use a stand-alone image editor.

3 Likes
7

You already have a very powerful utility natively in your Mac - ColorSync Utility.

I use it to enhance the contrast and other things in pdf scans of very old documents. Try it out!

1 Like