Looking for a way to scan inked imaged on vellum

Hello,

I am trying to scan some inked biological images on normal vellum/tracing paper. I'm pretty much a novice at using Adobe software, but it is what my department has to use. When I try to scan in black and white the image doesn't appear at all and with a sheet of white paper as a background the ink scans white and the background black. If anyone has a suggestion on how to correct this, I'd appreciate the help.

I also tried scanning in gray scale with the white background. The image came out okay except that the vellum shows and gives the drawings a somewhat fuzzy look. If any could suggest a filtering technique to correct this, that may also be helpful.

Thank you,

Justin Shafer
Old Dominion University

Scan in grayscale so that you can control the levels during scanning and cleanup.

Select the 'Image' menu and then convert mode->bitmap. Here is where you would choose 50% threshold to avoid dither.

If you still have that fuzzy look, scan again at a higher resolution.