I wanted to share a creative project with users of the incredible archives of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
I have taken on the task of digitally enhancing a large collection of classic Scandinavian botanical plates (originally published in the 1970s Danish editions). Over time, many of these beautiful historical prints had become faded, yellowed, or lost their original crispness.
Using modern digital restoration techniques, I have carefully cleaned the plates and removed age-related wear and tear—all while preserving the authentic vintage feel of the original hand-drawn illustrations.
To complement the visual restoration, I have also compiled detailed botanical descriptions for each plate, including the precise scientific nomenclature and morphological details.
You can explore the fully restored collection and the detailed descriptions here.
A huge thank you to the BHL team for keeping these historical treasures accessible. I would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or any questions about the restoration process from fellow botany and vintage art enthusiasts!
@mikkel These images look great! I’ve played a bit with automated cleaning of BHL pages, e.g.
Cleaning text and line drawings is fairly straightforward, colour plates are more challenging. Am I correct in thinking that you have manually cleaned each plate, or is the process partly automated?
Yes, easy to do, just time consuming with 663 plates to do. Scanned on Epson Perfection 4870 PHOTO, used bgremove and others like it, then Topaz Photo AI for upscaling, noise reduction and for some, colours and light. Then Luminar Neo for removing tekst and numbers manually. So, yes a lot, but not all, automated (AI).
@rdmpage I should mention, to be completely accurate, that this specific project was actually scanned from my own physical copies of Lindman’s work rather than downloaded directly from BHL. However, seeing the incredible work done here on BHL definitely inspired me to find my scans from years ago and bring these 663 plates back to life!
