Expert: Glen Demers - 11/14/2011

Question
Hi
I'm new to imaging, have obtained Photoshop CS3 and would appreciate guidance on where to start with my project.
I've obtained A4 prints of printed articles taken off 35mm film of newspapers held in my library's archive, in black and white. These were scanned (as jpegs) to my computer, examined in Picture Manager and looked reasonable oncsreen.
Wanting to enlarge the images, to make them more readable, (they're for public display), I initially printed the scanned images from Photoshop, to find that the background to the text was medium grey instead of white, being composed of of a multitude of tiny black dots, irregularly spaced, and of varying density around the image.
There are also various straight line marks (presumably scratches on the film) running through the text.
Is there any way I can remove/improve the background, perhaps by reducing the contrast before final printing, whilst still retaining the readability of the text, and also remove the black scratch marks running through the text, please?

Answer
Hi Peter,

The two tools that spring to mind are the Dust and Scratches filter, use a light touch, and the levels palette.

Go to Image>Adjustments>Levels to bring up the levels palette and drag the two endpoint sliders located directly under the histogram. The one on the left will darken the type and the one on the right will lighten the background, move them just inside of the large spikes on the histogram and adjust from there.

The filter under Filters>Noise>Dust & Scratches may remove the scratch marks but will blur the text and may remove fine details all together.