Hello, i play the keyboard and ive just decided to scan in all of my music.
the music is scanned in black and white. i am getting very small dots and they are a pain to remove.
I have used gimp but its not something that I use often so ive never been that good at it.
I have tried despeckle but I cannot get good results.
so - image>mode>RGB then filters>Enhanced>Despeckle.
im looking for something that can remove the noise out of scanned music.

Regards,

Warren.

To get despeckle to work on that image you will need to 1) select the speckles 2) bump the white value right up. https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/plug-in-despeckle.html Effectively fill the selections with white

Try the gmic plugin www.gmic.eu which has a couple of tools that might help.

Repair scanned documents - probably need the parameters maxed. screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/Z2zf1oc.jpg

For any remaining larger defects use Inpaint - paint over with the Pencil tool and apply https://i.imgur.com/c7w5qOJ.jpg

Another way:
Use the G'MIC "Extract Objects"

1. Use " Color to Alpha" to convert the white to transparent.

2. Open "G'MIC > Arrays & Tiles > Extract Objects"

3. Set the minimal area to a suitable value. Any black object with an area below minimal area is ignored.

4. You end up with each black object on its own layer. Use "Merge visible layers" to create one layer again.

Thank you Rich2005 and Blighty II because I learned some interesting things.

@warrentdo, despeckle seems to not work the same as it used to since vs 10. I cannot get it to work on photos at all now (especially old ones where there seems to be alot of noise) but will try some of these other suggestions now. Thanks for the question and thanks for the tips.

Thank you everyone! Very good question. A problem we have all probably struggled with at times. I know I have. I've not had an easy time with the G'MIC ones but did not really know how to use them properly. Thanks again for the good tips.