How to remove bleed-through from double-sided scanned text pages?

Question

Working from a 2500+ page history of our local town.  It's all photocopy typewritten text.  Some of the sheets are typed double-sided on thin paper.  That caused bleed-through noise during scanning.  Is it possible to remove the bleed-through noise in Acrobat Pro?

Lovekesh Garg · Accepted Answer

You can use "Optimize Image" settings for this during scan. Select the checkbox "Optimize Image" ON and click settings(gear icon). Make sure Background removal checkbox is ON.Thanks.

Todd Shaner · Answer

The best way to remove this type of bleed-through is during the scanning process. Place a piece of black paper on top of the page being scanned, which will significantly reduce the visibility of the opposite side type (assuming it is black). Make sure the scanner is set to Grayscale or Color and not B&W. You could also use Photoshop's Levels or Curves controls and then create an action to batch apply it to the affected scan files. You may need to do both.

You can also try using Acrobat Pro's OCR tools as outlined in the below post:

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