Help with fixing faded writing

[nuttkayc]

I received an old document already scanned, and very poorly, then printed out and mailed to me. I scanned it at a high resolution hoping to get something out of it. It's horrible; can anyone suggest some ways for me to attempt to bring out the writing?

Thanks.

[TommyO]

nuttkayc,
Several problems that I see...
- you are not in possession of the original, where you can control the scan. Best not to re-scan a bad scan.
- Secondly, recovering handwritten text is by no means easy even when the scan is good. Pens differ, pen pressure differs, papers differ, everything is a variable and rarely lines up so good that you get that perfect result.
- it really becomes more of an art. Yes there are some shortcuts that save time, like taking advantage of blend modes like overlay, where you can easily remove marks that fall below the 128 threshold. But, in the end it will take a lot of tedious work.

You must try and borrow the original, or have a pro scan the original and send you the resulting TIFF via email or a large file sharing site. You can save days of work that way.

Best of luck with it and I hope to return so I can see the outcome !

[flexmanta]

Sorry to say... the text is just not there, so there's nothing to recover.