Experiment finds common OCR preprocessing steps reduce accuracy on clean screenshots

A developer tested 13 common image preprocessing techniques on clean screenshots to assess their impact on Optical Character Recognition accuracy. Using the ImgIng OCR engine across multiple tiers, the default settings performed best, achieving a 0.1% character error rate. Most preprocessing steps, including binarization, denoising filters, and aggressive thresholds, increased the error rate, with some causing it to exceed 30%. The experiment concluded that for clean digital screenshots, applying common cleanup techniques often degrades OCR performance rather than improving it.