: How can you remove a stucco texture from an image? I have a photo of a mural painted on a stucco wall that needs to be digitized. Is there an easy way to remove all of the stucco texture

 

@Ogunnowo857

Decided to use this for a 60 second video tutorial you can grab here if you prefer to watch video:

Similar to Film Grain the more Stucco texture you remove the less detail you'll be left with. So I'm not going to remove all of it but will flatten it a good bit using a very simple Curves Adjustment.

To start switch it to LAB mode. This is going to be hugely beneficial for something like this because of how it handles colors vs contrast. Now all you need to do is flatten the Lightness channel by literally opening the Curve and make the diagonal line ... flat. Now at this point you can see why we don't want to remove all of the stucco.



So play with the curve a bit until you get a happy place where the stucco is less pronounced but you still have a fair bit of detail. I ended up with a Curve like this:



If you want to take it further you could then apply some sort of blur to it, I would use Noise → Median set to 1 or 2 at most. Of course I'm also working off of the lower res copy you uploaded so play with it until you're satisfied. Be sure to duplicate the layer first or convert it to use Smart Filters.

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