How can colour streaking from scanner be eliminated using Photoshop?

Question

Here is a scan of an album cover. The scanner creates bands of colour streaking at regular intervals horizontally across the image.

Is it possible to eliminate these artifacts using Photoshop, so that the colour of the card stock is even, all without affecting the textures? Use of the clone tool, patch tool, etc are not permissible.

Edit: The colour streaking is likely a hardware issue, as I have cleaned every inch of the glass multiple times (both sides), and cleaned the calibration target as well. I can't replace the scanner anytime soon.

Edit: Upon further investigation, I've noticed that this phenomenon hasn't occurred on every album cover that I have scanned. I scanned the other three sleeves from this album, one bright orange, one yellow, and one green. Curiously, the banding only occurs on the pink and the orange sleeves. I tried scanning them in grayscale, but banding still resulted.

Answer 1

The issue is there are real world limitations in play that you may be unaware of. It's not as simple as "tweaking" a setting anywhere. Because of these limitations, it is going to most likely take more work than simply scanning and being done.

What you see as a solid pink.. is most likely not actually a solid pink. Printed items are created with a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black dots like this:

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The human eye then "blends" the dots to create an appearance of a solid color. You can use a loupe or magnifying glass on printed materials to see the actual dots.

Rarely is what looks like a solid color actually solid. It is possible to print a solid color via spot colors, but I think it's unlikely that album cover uses any spot colors (it would probably be cost prohibitive for a record label - cuz they generally want profits for themselves).

So, the scanner sees these dot patterns and creates what's called a moiré when scanning. This is what you are seeing as "streaks." There's little that can be done about a scanner's moiré - it is simply the result of scanning something that has been commercially printed. Moirés are most noticeable in fields of similar/solid colors.

Sometimes scanning at a 45° angle can help reduce any scanner moiré, but it may never vanish entirely.

The real solution is to scan for the black. Get a solid black scan eliminating the pink. Then, in image editing software add a solid pink background to match the original cover. And finally a "pattern overlay" to create the pseudo texture. At least, that's how I would handle a similar project.

Answer 2

Just that black text on the pink looks like it can be recreated easily with a proper font. It's like something simple typewriter art. Try it. Then insert the background you like.

A monospace font should be used. Courier New is quite close, but not exact. Here's the scanned letter D and a retyped version of it in Illustrator.

A slight stroke is added to make the glyphs look heavy enough