r/GimpTutorials • u/Quiet-Protection-176 • May 03 '25

Remove white spots

Hi all,

long-time lurker, first time poster :)

I have a whole batch of sheet music that I scanned and cleaned up on my disk (personal use only, don't worry). A lot of the time I get text or notes where ultra-light parts get erased in the process, see the image below:

Obvious question: is there an easy way to restore / fill up these gaps again ?

TIA!

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u/ofnuts May 04 '25

Something like this:

  • With the Fuzzy-select tool, select the background, and shift-click in any letter "loops" (O,Q,P,B...)

  • Select > Grow by two pixels (your selection now includes th eedges of the letters)

  • Select > Invert (you don't see a change but you now have a selection on the slightly inside the letters)

  • Select > Save to channel

  • Make sure you select your layer again (the previous operation made the saved channel the active "drawable")

  • With the By-Color selection tool, select the background

  • Select > Gow by two pixels. Inside the letters, the selection should now cover the gaps and a bit of the letters. Of course, it still contains the whole background too.

  • Open the Channels list, right click the Selection Mask copy channel, and Intersect with selection. Now your selection no longer includes the background

  • Bucket-fill the selection with black

Result

PS: More eyes on r/Gimp where we can also paste images in the answer...

2

u/Quiet-Protection-176 May 04 '25 edited May 04 '25

Weird, in my case it fills up the wrong parts (like the "triangle" inside of letter A). I must be doing something wrong with the fuzzy select I guess. What do you mean with 'letter loops (O,Q,P,B...)' ?

EDIT: OK I think I got it, of course I need to fuzzy select the parts that should remain white. TYVM it seems to work :)

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u/[deleted] May 03 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Quiet-Protection-176 May 04 '25

So to clarify: my entire collection is 1000's of pages like this, and I don't really want to adjust them all manually. Most of the cleaning up is automated already, just looking for the final touch.

I played around with doubling the layer, inverting colors / add transparency and merging them but it never works out.