Removing print-screens

[krm]

I sometimes get scans of old newspaper photos. These BW pics have a fine-grained even black-dot "screen" overall which was part of the paper printing process. I can sometimes reduce the prominence of the "screen" by experimenting with different De-speckle settings, but often cannot clear them completely. Does anyone have a method for "de-screening" photos like these?
TIA.

[flagpole]

you couldn't post a sample could you?

[hartpaul]

From my experience it was better to scan these at the highest possible settings, then apply the various effects that would soften and blend the image together (spread the dots making up various parts) .
Then you resize down to the size you require and sharpen and you should find that it produces a better image.
The problem with those newspaper pictures is that they are black or white and that appearances of grey are produced by having smaller black dots and or spreading them further apart.

[krm]

Here is a portion of a BW image with a print-screen effect in place.

shewing BW print-screen effect

[LeviFiction]

There are several ways to handle this. Essentially since this is very similar to a half-tone image or is one, you want to blend pixels creating a solid tone and then use a sharpening method to make up for the blurry difference.

You could use the Moire pattern removal filter in PSP. This filter is meant for things like half-tones and screen patterns found on things like magazine covers.

As Hartpaul send scanning in as big as possible and then resizing down will blend the pixels.

You will also find many people recommending a mixture between Gaussian Blur at a low level to blend the dots, and Unsharp Mask to sharpen up the image. This one will take a lot of playing around with as there are no set values to use.

Here are examples of all three:

1) Moire with unsharp mask

2) Resized to 4000 pixels wide, gaussian blur, resized back down to 900. Not the normal process but I gave it a go

3) Gaussian blur of 2, Unsharp mask Radius 3, strength of 112, and clipping of 1

[krm]

Thanks all, and specially Levi for the extra trouble. I liked your #3 best. I followed the general principle, resizing to 1200dpi. Then I applied different noise removals and stepped back each in turn to compare. Then I blurred twice, using average mode. Then I resized back down to 300. This removed practically all of the screening. Thanks again.