Ageing paper scanned in greyscale

[RMS1]

Hi,
I am using Paint Shop Pro. I have scanned the inside black and white pages of a very old comic book in greyscale. The images have blotchy grey markings wherever there is supposed to be white, especially in backgrounds. This is because the paper has turned light brown with age, and also, some black ink markings on the opposite side of the page are showng through.
What is the best and hopefullly a reasonably quick method in Paint Shop Pro to fade out, reduce or alter to white the unwanted grey markings which should be total white?
I'm uploading an attached JPG file of a scanned comic page sample. It has been vastly reduced in file size from the original so that it will display here.
Thanks.

[hartpaul]

Try Adjust > Brightnes and Contrast > Brightness/Contrast and set Brightness to -48 and contrast to 95.

[Jean-Luc]

Action-s1-017-p022c.jpg

I have scanned the inside black and white pages of a very old comic book in greyscale.

Don't do that.
The scan must be done at 300 or, better, at 600 DPI AND in colors.
Place a black paper behind the page : this will stop the opposite side from being visible.
The brown background will be easily removed as a separate color.
Scanning in greyscale transforms the brown background in grey which is similar to some parts of the drawing (plane stroke, for example). If you remove the grey background, you will remove details in the drawing.

[TimW]

RMS1 - Here's 3 steps you might want to try. They correct 95% of what you see, but do leave a little bit to clean up by hand - cloning etc...

1.) One Step Noise Removal
2.) Highlight/MIdtone/Shadows set to: Shadow -59, Midtone 20, Highlight 100
3.) Brightness/Contrast: Brt -42, Cont +44

A higher resolution image should give better results.

[CHoffman]

Scan in color. In PSP, separate the image into the RGB images. Look at each one and use the one with the least staining. Discard the others. Follow advice above re resolution. Slip a piece of black paper behind the sheet while scanning to reduce visibility of what's on the back side of the page.

[RMS1]

Thank you to everyone for your replies - I have learnt a great deal from this. The original scan was done at the minimum of 300 DPI.