Annoyance
Posted by matijs 20/09/2004 at 20h37
I have just spent most of this day trying to get nice scans of some of my photographs. And I'm annoyed.
My father found me a working scanner in the trash. Yes, people throw away perfectly good scanners. And monitors too. I even threw away a perfectly good computer once. It was hideously old, and someone else found it in the trash. I know, because it was gone before the garbage truck came. Anyway, after a while we managed to arrange for the scanner to actually come to my house, and after fixing an endianness-problem it actually worked. Note that I consider fixing endianness-problems fun.
So, what is the problem? The scans are overlayed with a wave pattern of blue and red. It's a pattern that repeats every 16 rows, and it's perfectly predictable. It's also very hard to filter out using standard image tools.
I know almost nothing about image filtering, and I know nothing of scripting either the Gimp, or ImageMagick. So, while trying to figure out what I had to do to the image to get it right, I was also trying to figure out how to do whatever I had to do using the underdocumented scripting features of these fine programs. Let me qualify that: Gimp's Script-Fu may be well-documented, but I didn't want to combine the two things I already didn't know with a programming language I didn't know (i.e., scheme), so I stayed with the Perl version.
So, I spent a day without much progress (well, the colors look better), and I'm so annoyed, that while writing this, I smeared garlic on my keyboard.