Print text in black, gray shades white?

Question

Acrobat Pro DCWindows 10 ProMonochrome Laser PrinterPeople email me documents they scanned to PDF.  Their scanning method is oftentimes poor, leaving the entire PDF with a gray background.  I want my printouts to be free of the gray background that take up the entire PDF.  Basically, I want the light gray background to "print" white and text to print as black. I have tried multiple times to figure this out.

Document Geek · Accepted Answer

Try running OCR. That will convert the background to an image and make the text live, and change it to black. You may be able to then use the Edit tools to delete the background.

Stephen Marsh · Answer

AFAIK Acrobat Pro preflight fixups will only work with vectors/text and not images. I know that you can “fix” this with Enfocus PitStop Pro, using a curve one can map the light gray pixels to white and darken the darker gray pixels to black.

This leaves you with editing the image one by one, Acrobat Pro can send the image to Photoshop as a temp file, you then update it using a curve or other methods and then save and close the temp file and Acrobat updates it. This is one image at a time, one page at a time. Otherwise you open each individual image or page into Photoshop and edit and save out new images or PDF files that then need to be recombined into a single PDF.

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