Hi,

Scans of historic documents are widely available but the quality is often poor.
I regularly need to restore downloaded images of text pages of old books, so as to print them as facsimiles, to restore incomplete books, however I am sure I am not doing it as well as it could be done.

I have attached a couple of originals, to give an idea.

What I am hoping for is a 'how to' to get to a clean image for each page without going mad in the process...

Generally the scans have noise and the text is uneven. On the plus side they are always black and white. The files are generally either tif or jpeg.

If anyone is willing or able to give an idiot's step-by-step guide to this or point me to a good GIMP resource, I'd be hugely grateful.
Best wishes,
Nick