Propose black and white points from the scan

Levels shipped at 0–255 unless someone moved the sliders, and Bicycle
Race showed what that costs. Its ink is grey, not black — a scanned
engraving, ink at 2–95, paper at 163–255 — and with alpha = 255 − luminance
that greyness becomes transparency. No pixel in the exported bundle was
even fully opaque, and the downscale to the song's width blended every
stroke edge further. Nothing downstream can rescue it.

So detection proposes levels too, like it proposes cuts and skew.
Notation is two-tone, which makes Otsu's split the measurement wanted;
the points sit halfway from it to each end of the range, so the ramp
between them survives as antialiasing rather than going jagged. A page
already scanned bilevel has no interior split — Otsu degenerates to 0 —
and is left alone. Per page, with the median becoming the song's, so a
near-blank page cannot set them.
This commit is contained in:
Esa Kataja
2026-07-29 12:50:37 +03:00
parent 38cb6ce09a
commit 19f28f4da8
5 changed files with 67 additions and 7 deletions
+5 -4
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@@ -44,10 +44,11 @@ off.
one back.
4. **Set the content rectangle.** Drag the blue edges so they hold the music and
nothing else. This is the horizontal crop for every slice on the page.
5. **Set black and white points.** Pull the *White point* down until the paper
goes pure white and its texture disappears; pull *Black point* up until the
notes are solid black rather than grey mush. Scans need this; clean digital
PDFs usually don't.
5. **Check black and white points.** These arrive proposed from the scan, like
the cuts do. If the paper still shows texture, pull *White point* down; if the
notes look grey rather than solid, pull *Black point* up. Getting this wrong
is the one mistake you cannot see until the bundle is on the tablet — grey ink
becomes half-transparent ink, and nothing downstream can rescue it.
Page Up / Page Down move between pages. Levels carry over from the previous
page, so a consistent scan only needs setting once.
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@@ -236,6 +236,14 @@ point just under the paper's luminance and the paper vanishes completely; set th
black point at the ink's darkest and notes go solid. It is also the single
biggest lever on output size.
**Detection proposes both**, like it proposes cuts and skew, because the default
0255 is the one setting whose harm is invisible until the bundle is on a tablet.
Notation is two-tone, so Otsu's split between ink and paper is the measurement;
the points sit halfway from it to each end of the range, leaving the ramp between
them as the antialiasing. A page already scanned bilevel has no interior split —
Otsu degenerates to 0 there — and is left at 0255. The proposal is per page and
the median becomes the song's, so a near-blank page cannot set it.
Adaptive methods (CLAHE, adaptive thresholding) are the trap — tuned for text,
they eat the thin stuff on notation: hairpin tips, slur ends, ledger lines,
tapered beams. A global LUT whose effect you can see beats a local algorithm you