Tips and Tricks: How Clean up Graphic Recordings
A question that crops up a lot in this field is how to clean up graphic recordings following an event.
No matter how visually appealing the final result of a hard days graphic recording looks on a 6 foot piece of paper hanging on the wall at the end of an event, it’s hard to reproduce that digitally. In the dwindling light at the end of the day, in an already dingy hall, the photographic results are often less than satisfactory.
Luckily there are some handy tools at hand and lots of advice to direct us how to clean up graphic recordings and other visual notes. For a quick fix — you can opt for a app like CamScanner. I use this for personal Sketchnotes, or things I need to clean up quickly for a live tweet or to circulate on social media. I’ll just snap a photo with my iPhone and have a clean image processed and ready to go in no time. Apps like this definitely have a time and a place, and are getting much better. However at the time of writing, the cleaning up process of these apps can be pretty brutal and tend to bleach out lighter colours and cause a little too much saturation to my liking. I tend to stay away from them when I’m after something a little more finely tuned.
For bigger and more complex works my go to tool is Photoshop. Although cleaning up an image with Photoshop may seem like a dauntingly technical process at first, fortunately many others have trodden this path before us and left a trail of helpful tips. I’m part of a network of fellow UK Visual Practitioners and they are always on hand to provide a wealth of information. The best piece of advice I’ve been given, and have subsequently practiced when possible, is to always take my SLR and take a high quality RAW image of the graphic recording at the event in the best possible light (a rare occurrence, I know!). That provides a great starting point for Photoshop, as the brighter the original image, the easier it is to clean up — although this process also works for dark, skewed images. It just takes a little more patience!
You don’t need to have the newest, fanciest version of Photoshop (although if you do then that’s great!) I’m currently working with CS4 and it works perfectly for my requirements. As for the Photoshop process itself I was guided towards this tutorial by Rachel S. Smith. I haven’t found another resource that comes close to providing such an easy to follow step by step guide of how to clean up graphic recordings. She runs through all the steps from cropping the image to playing around with levels, and really helps to work magic. She learnt this process from David Sibbet, one of the key figures in developing the practice of Graphic Facilitations — so it is a tried and tested means specifically for the task in hand.
Here’s an example of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ shot from an event we scribed last week.
The final result is never going to be an exact rendering of the original, but you can get pretty close. It’s a little like darkroom photography. It’s a constant process of trial and error, but when that crisp image begins to emerge from the dark it’s a rewarding experience a rewarding experience and provides a image that both you and your clients will be over the moon with.
