Clean Old image

[pyrotalk]

Folks

Our librarian has an extensive amount of old journals and papers. One paper in particular is a 1945 report scanned in pdf. No hardcopy exits for this file.  The whole reports needs a cleanup but in particular the graphs have these tiny black dots all over. Which software will be able to fix this? Photoshop or something better? one coworker has photoshop but is a project by itself.. Here is a snippet of the report.

[Mylenium]

Is that snippet full res? If so, then the brutal reality of it is "Forget it!" That would be like editing microprints on post stamps without a magnifying glass - painfully daubing over the stray pixels with a 1 pixel brush one pixel at a time. If there is a high-res version, some channel operations, filters and adjustments might do the trick rather quickly, but6 otherwise it would be simpler to just re-draw those diagrams from scratch.

Mylenium

[Norman Sanders]

Since the tiny black dots you referred to are of similar density to the grid lines, there is no practical way to eliminate one and not the other. On the other hand, since your coworker uses Photoshop and the graphs (if they are similar to your sample) would be simple to recreate. For example, here is the grid in the increments appearing in the samples.  The lines are one pixel wide.