I need help!

[Hotsuma]

Hello, good people. I have a question. Whenever I print out a scanned document, it'll always come out looking dirty or really grey. Which is unusual because if I were to scan and print a document without it ever going to my PC, it'll come out looking exactly like the original document. If I were to scan and save it to my PC, the scan would look exactly like the original document. BUT, if I were to print out that scanned document, it would come out looking dirty and grey. I've used several different programs to print out that document and every single one of them come out looking dirty and grey.

I have a Ricoh Aficio SP 311SFNw printer / scanner but the printer is not the problem. So, my question is, how do I clean up a scanned document with Corel PaintShop Pro x8 so that it will come out looking like the original document? What I need is a way to make the background white and the text darker.

[Jean-Luc]

Try Histogram adjustment (Ctrl + Shift + H).
Edit Luminance.
Increase Low (go to the feet of the curve).
Decrease High (go to the feet of the curve).

[Hotsuma]

That helped a lot. Thanks!

[Hotsuma]

I have another question, Jean-Luc. What tool will let me, for example, click on the white area of an image and then make the whole background of that image white without affecting the text?

[Jean-Luc]

When you say "white area", I suppose it is not pure white. Some light grey area are visible in the white.
You may try to select the "white" with the Magic Wand tool, Contiguous unchecked, Feather 0 and try different values for Tolerance (too much and it will erode the text).
This will remove all pixels and make the white area transparent.
Put a white layer under and merge all.
I don't think you will be able to do what you want in ONE click (but you can do it in one click with a script).

[Jean-Luc]

You may also try :
Image
Decrease Color Depth
2 colors palette

PS : a sample (crop) of your text at original size could help to find a solution.

[Hotsuma]

Ok. Thanks!