Computer Picture Problem

John T · Jul 10, 2013

Okay, I had to get a copy of an old Deed from the Recorders Office and it was sooooooooooo oldddddddddd it was on Microfiche or something and all I could get was a document where the background was all black and the words were typed in white. Needless to say to print that would take a whole bottle of printer ink. I have it as a PDF File and also a Microsoft Office Word picture file and I only have the cheap Adobe reader program NOT Photo Shop etc.

Anyway I can convert/flip/reverse/image that picture file so the paper is white and the words are in black???????????

John T

Nebraska Cowman · Jul 10, 2013

I think you can use "paint" to invert colors

John T · Jul 10, 2013

I cant even get the PDF saved to any sort of a picture file whereby I can get it into a picture editing program so I can even attempt that grrrrrrrrrr IM NOT A GOOD HAND WITH PDF FORMAT

I sent the file to my Architect Daughter and told her to helppppppp daddyyyyyyyyyy lol she surely has the smarts and software to do it, after allllllllllll that money spent in her schooling grrrrrrr

Thanks Cowman

John T

SweetFeet · Jul 10, 2013

If you cannot figure out how to invert colors (almost sounds like Microfiche is like a photo negative)...

You can open the PDF with the free Adobe Reader and under Edit you can "Take a Snapshot"... where you select the area you want to copy - then paste it into a Word document.

Then click on the "picture" you just pasted into Word.
Next, click on the Format tab... and you should then be able to at least turn it to "greyscale" so you will be printing a grey page with white lettering vs. a full page of pure black.

OR someone here may have a better method.

Chip812 · Jul 10, 2013

(quoted from post at 15:27:20 07/10/13) If you cannot figure out how to invert colors (almost sounds like Microfiche is like a photo negative)...

You can open the PDF with the free Adobe Reader and under Edit you can "Take a Snapshot"... where you select the area you want to copy - then paste it into a Word document.

Then click on the "picture" you just pasted into Word.
Next, click on the Format tab... and you should then be able to at least turn it to "greyscale" so you will be printing a grey page with white lettering vs. a full page of pure black.

OR someone here may have a better method.

Do the first part of this, but instead of "pasting" (i.e. Ctrl-V) into a Word document, paste it into MSPaint, then you can easily invert the colors and print it from there (be sure to do a print preview first - MSPaint has some weird ideas about printing 1/4 of pictures on 4 separate pages)...

John T · Jul 10, 2013

THANKS YALL

Paint did the trick yayyyyyyyyyy

I copied the page in Adobe PDF,,,,,,,,Pasted it into Paint,,,,,,,,,,,Inverted colors,,,,,,,,saved it as a JPG

Yall are great

John T

John T · Jul 10, 2013

THANKS YALL
Paint did the trick yayyyyyyyyyy

I copied the page in Adobe PDF,,,,,,,,Pasted it into Paint,,,,,,,,,,,Inverted colors,,,,,,,,saved it as a JPG

Yall are great

John T

MarkB_MI · Jul 10, 2013

John, it sounds like it worked out OK, but there are better ways to do this. The problem with copying and pasting is that you're copying the image at screen resolution, even though the actual file resolution is probably much higher, as is the resolution of your printer.

Thanks to the hippies and socialists in the open source software movement, there are plenty of free alternatives to PhotoShop. The most well-known is "GIMP" (GNU Image Manipulation Program). You can download it from www.gimp.org.

For this sort of work, I prefer to use a set of command-line tools known collectively as ImageMagick (www.imagemagick.org). Command-line tools may seem like an anachronism in this day and age, but us UNIX hacks use them all the time. Using the ImageMagick "convert" tool to invert an image is ridiculously simple:

convert original_file.pdf -negate inverted_file.pdf

I'd like to see anyone do that in Photoshop faster than I can type. Give me a hundred PDFs or JPEGs to convert and I'll throw together a little script and convert them all in the time it takes Photoshop to load. Give me a thousand and I'll sit back and have a beer while the PC cranks them all out.

Royse · Jul 10, 2013

(quoted from post at 22:11:08 07/10/13) John, it sounds like it worked out OK, but there are better ways to do this. The problem with copying and pasting is that you're copying the image at screen resolution, even though the actual file resolution is probably much higher, as is the resolution of your printer.

Thanks to the hippies and socialists in the open source software movement, there are plenty of free alternatives to PhotoShop. The most well-known is "GIMP" (GNU Image Manipulation Program). You can download it from www.gimp.org.

For this sort of work, I prefer to use a set of command-line tools known collectively as ImageMagick (www.imagemagick.org). Command-line tools may seem like an anachronism in this day and age, but us UNIX hacks use them all the time. Using the ImageMagick "convert" tool to invert an image is ridiculously simple:

convert original_file.pdf -negate inverted_file.pdf

I'd like to see anyone do that in Photoshop faster than I can type. Give me a hundred PDFs or JPEGs to convert and I'll throw together a little script and convert them all in the time it takes Photoshop to load. Give me a thousand and I'll sit back and have a beer while the PC cranks them all out.

You run UNIX on your PC?

Another free alternative for the point and click (Windows) folks is PhotoScape.
Does a pretty good job of cropping, brightness adjusting, etc.

MarkB_MI · Jul 11, 2013

Royse, as a matter of fact I do run UNIX on my PC. Linux (Fedora) to be precise, but the practical difference between Linux and a commercial UNIX such as Solaris isn't worth discussing. Been running Linux at home for over 15 years. At work I switch back and forth between machines running Solaris and others running Linux. And since I don't want to give up UNIX on my work laptop (which has to run Windows), I load Cygwin, a Linux environment for Windows, on the laptop.

Computer Picture Problem

John T

Well-known Member

Nebraska Cowman

Well-known Member

John T

Well-known Member

SweetFeet

Well-known Member

Chip812

Member

John T

Well-known Member

John T

Well-known Member

MarkB_MI

Well-known Member

Royse

Well-known Member

MarkB_MI

Well-known Member

Similar threads