Home Photo-copying: Photograph and Copying

I guess we have been in a situation like here: we wanted to make photocopy at night but...

1. the multipurpose printer cannot do the job, since the document to be copied is so thick and it cannot be feeded into the document scanner

2. if you just take a photograph and print it out, the resulting copy does not look like photocopied at all

So, the problem becomes how to make an image from a digital camera, to look like a copy made by a traditional photocopy machine? Let me outline the steps:

1. Take a snapshot of the document with a DC, does use flash, and try to use an even light source; macro mode works out nice

2. Copy the image to the PC

3. Use your image processing software to crop the surrounding, just keep the document at the center

4. Change your image into gray scale

5. Adjust the "level" to make the histogram nice, i.e. the whole dynamic range is used

6. Do a "stamp" filter, it can be found under "Sketch". That's even a "photocopy" filter in photoshop, but it does not work as nice as "stamp"

7. Print it out

I guess you will be surprised by how much it looks like a real photocopied document!