here, i'm gonna clean up a scan of "leaf of spring" by yessenin-volpin, since i finally want to produce a Real Nice version of this for clownshowprison
some comments: this scan is actually good, just really weird. i have no idea why it looks like it was pulled from the bottom of a lake. but the text etc is quite crisp so we dont need to worry about it.
if we want to print this, we gotta get rid of the background. there's a slight variance in color for verso/recto, but its all pretty similar
i use two tools to do this. primarily i try to 'color to alpha' all the pages into being black text on transparent background. if it's difficult to do this cleanly, i may do a pass where i boost the contrast on all of the pages, to make it easier to alpha out the background.
i recommend throwing a blank white layer at the bottom of everything to help you tell if youre doing a good job or not
"color to alpha" lives under the 'colors' menu (not the 'tools' menu)
use the eyedropper to get smth representative for the background, then fiddle with all the knobs there till it looks nice. if you need to use the eyedropper again, you might need to uncheck 'preview' first.
i was actually able to get better than i expected by just giving it the ol alpha, but its finicky and annoying so im gonna go do some brightness/contrast tweaking that'll make it easier
brightness/contrast is also under colors!!
more knobs to fiddle with. we want to keep the lettering a nice solid black while making the background go far away, so its easily separable w/ color to alpha. its all an art and not a science. just have fun with it. it's exciting!!! youre making a book!!!!!
combinations of these two will take you like everywhere you need to go. i have one more piece of advice for this section. cuz you may be balking at the idea of having to do this like 200-300-400 times. lemme show you smth lifechanging
go to the edit menu and slide down to keyboard shortcuts
look up "repeat", find this one that repeats whatever the last thing you did, and bind it to a letter key. dont bind it to ctrl+anything or shift+anything just make it 1 letter and thats the only way youre not gonna get carpal tunnel.
here's a few more i use constantly & this whole process is only feasible if i have them bound to keys that i can rhythmically slam like im playing an arpeggio on a piano. at this point you should experiment on your own and get a sense of these, but feel free to ask me for help if you need