Software for deciphering illegible gravestones inscriptions

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Permalink Reply by Chip Taylor on July 29, 2009 at 6:25am

Avraham,
Here is what I have done with much success. After photographing the stone, bring up the photo in Photoshop or another good graphics program (I use Paint Shop Pro). Convert to grayscale (important). Use the contrast, brightness and sharpness tools to enhance the stone's inscriptions. In Paint Shop Pro I have also had good success with apply the "Fix Digital Camera Noise" tool. If that is still not sufficient to read the inscriptions then many times inverting the colors (making a "black and white" negative) gives good results.

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Permalink Reply by Greg Settle on July 29, 2009 at 3:23pm

I've had some good results using the 'Emboss' feature in Paint.NET which is a free program, btw.

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Permalink Reply by Avraham Yehoshua Kahana on July 30, 2009 at 1:44am

Thank you both, all I had tried so far was with irfanview.com , inverting colors, applying the negative filter... but I have many pictures 150 old in very very bad conditions, sometimes toppled, broken, etc.

Will try your suggestions. Thanks !

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