This is my first post in this forum, so: hello everybody!
I use MSP on a Booc Max3, which is an android device with an e-ink display.
I have lots of sheet music on the device, most of it are self-scanned pdf or jpg-files,
many have been scanned in gray-scale mode. As a consequence, especially with pages from old originals, the scores sometimes appearquite dark when displayed on the e-ink-device.
And here comes the question: is there any way to modify brightness or contrast in MSP?
There are no brightness or contrast settings in MobileSheetsPro at the moment. If you take an image with a pure white background and display it on the screen, does it still appear dark? Or do your grayscale images have gray backgrounds? I'm trying to determine if what you are asking for is not the ability for MobileSheetsPro to increase the contrast of the image (i.e. take content that is gray and make it white, similar to what the sharpening feature in MobileSheetsPro already does), but for MobileSheetsPro to increase the contrast/brightness of the display, which it doesn't have direct control over. If you tap the navigation ball, you should be able to access optimizations for MobileSheetsPro (these are the ones built into the Onyx OS, so if you haven't updated the firmware, you may need to do so). I believe there are contrast and brightness optimizations available.
The grayscale-images do have gray backgrounds, the amount of gray is differing a lot, depending mostly on the age of the original paper.
And I have to admit, the title of my post is misleading: actually I'm looking for automatically whitening gray background.
The contrast setting of the OS (Android) does not help brightening the background. Then there is the navigation ball which offers the option "Whiten background". This sounds exactly like the thing that I am looking for, however it does not make the background any whiter than without this option activated.
There are some other settings available with the default viewer app for PDF and jpg-files (the one that is shipped with the Onyx Boox). This app allows for sharpening and adjusting contrast, features that do not really help with brightening the background colour. But there is another slider that is called "watermark". I really have no idea what this is intended for, but it does wonderful things: the black areas stay black and sharp while the gray background colour becomes more white the more the slider is moved to the right.
Is there any way to achieve that effect with MSP as well?
I'd suggest to hand over the dark image files to a specialist program for image editing. There are lots of them available.
My humble opinion on this: MSPro is already so complex that it takes quite a while to fathom it. And there are so many specialized image editing software tools for so many special effects which may be requested by different users, that I deem it nonsensical to reinvent the (image optimization) wheel once again.
Let poor Mike do what he knows best: Create a wonderful and very feature-rich score presentation program, with all its countless music-oriented requirements.
Is there any way to achieve that effect with MSP as well?
I hope MS is not going to compete with image editors and become Jack of all trades.
You need something like Photoshop or GIMP. Find Gamma slider which changes midtones while keeping the blacks and the whites the same. Increasing Gamma makes dark areas darker and light areas lighter.
I'm afraid you need to adjust every bad PDF/image/scan individually.
I definitely don't plan on making MobileSheets an image editing program, but I think it's helpful if I add support for a few simple things like being able to deskew crooked images. As far as what is being discussed in this post, I would recommend trying the sharpening feature in MobileSheets, as it analyzes the image and makes dark content darker and light content lighter. So that will take the gray background and make it whiter while taking the notes and such on the page and make them blacker. To access the sharpening feature, load a song, tap the center of the page to bring up the song overlap. tap the icon at the bottom left that looks like a gallery icon and then tap on "Sharpen". Let me know if you have any questions about this.
02-19-2020, 06:43 PM (This post was last modified: 02-19-2020, 06:45 PM by McAroni.)
A programm like Adobe Scan does a good job to whiten the background. Its an app for Android and IOS i think
a quick and dirty example as attachement. (no good lightning) just for demonstration original jpg -> pdf no adjustments on both
If you have an eye on good lightning conditions for the scan (photo) then there are really good results possible
Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE Android 12
Samsung Note Pro 12.2 LineageOS 14.1
Huawei Media Pad M3 lite Android 7
thanks for your reply and your suggestion. I tried the sharpening feature. It does increase blackness and sharpness, but the light areas remain the same.
Do you think that this is due to the e-ink-display?
It depends what you mean when you say, "the light areas remain the same". If you mean they are not bright enough, or not white enough, then yes, that's probably just the nature of the e-ink display.
For those using Windows 10, may I recommend the free and very easy-to-use Paint.NET? I have been scanning a variety of old fakebook pages and I've found (for reasons I don't have enough optics background to understand) that for some of my scans with grayish corners (presumably where ambient light slips in when I have chosen not to break the book's bindings) using the simple Brightness/Contrast control in Paint.NET, and LOWERING the brightness while RAISING the contrast eliminates the grayish corners and actually SEEMS to make the page look brighter. FWIW.
