I’m sure that many of you have had photo prints sent to you with the words “Do not bend” on the envelope, only to find that the postman ignored the instruction. You then discover that your prints have creases that ruined what could have been perfect photos.

Fortunately, HP is working on a process that can remove that accursed crease from your photo prints. Best of all, the process requires no special equipment but an ordinary flatbed scanner.

Most scanners use two separate lights to artificially capture the color of a photograph. If these lights move independently from each other, then two separate images can be captured. The software can then kick in and do the “infilling” process of removing pixels inside the scanned crease, replacing them with pixels outside the crease.

There is still a lot of bugs to be worked out of this process, as any defects that lie against the glass cannot be detected, and bigger creases could be a problem.

Still, it is good to see that someone is thinking ahead when it comes to restoring old photo prints. I’m sure we all love the Red-eye removal feature, so why not come up with a process that removes those creases?

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