: Removing background and cut out and sharpen handwritten text I'm scanning some old text my grandma wrote in a book. I need to remove the background and just keep the handwriting on a white

@Holmes874

Use curves in Photoshop:



The background gets overexposed and loses its color. This kind of curve unfortunately adds saturation and color differences in darker areas. Turn the cyan back to blue by Hue & Saturation



You can reduce the saturation, if the blue is too saturated for you.

ADDENDUM: The remnants (=random dots) of the paper surface texture can be dramatically reduced by using some noise sample based noise reductin software such as Neat Image Free. It must be applied just after the curves tool. The curves tool should be used more careful to keep the clipping low in the textures, only the plain paper should reach overexposure limit. The noise sample was taken from the paper area. See the result after turning the cyan to blue:



Another hint: probably your scanner has in its user interface the curves tool or also very good "levels tool". There you can save the settings for faster work.

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@Angela777

If you're working with Pixlr you need these settings:


Go to Adjustment > Auto Levels
Adjustment > Brightness & Contrast:
28 & 15
Adjustment > Color Balance:
11, -12, 45
Adjustment > Hue & Saturation (ctrl+u):
-13, -22, -2


This result you should get:

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@Annie732

Open the file or image
Click on Image > adjustments > Auto levels (shift+ctrl+L)

Below step you have to do twice with different settings


click on Click on Image > adjustments > Brightness / contrast
A pop Adjust 50 / 30 > ok





click on Click on Image > adjustments > Brightness / contrast
A pop Adjust 23 / 38 > ok




This settings will give the below result

Final result

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