How to make handwriting legible?

[RobertHD05]

I have a scan of a handwritten note. What to do to make the writing darker and even while increasing the contrast to make the writing legible?

Thanks, -- Robert

[John Waller]

Can you post a sample here?

[RobertHD05]

Thanks for the reply John.  This is the sample I started with from a friend. Apparently the originals are lost.

[Norman Sanders]

Duplicate the layer and change its blending mode to Multiply. Then Cmd+J several times to increase the density of the handwriting

[D Fosse]

I'm not sure that helps a whole lot. The problem is that this is scanned as bitmap - meaning pixels are already either full black or full white, but no gray to bring out. It looks like this:

If you blur it a bit, and expand the black pixels with the "Minimum"-filter, you get this. Not much better:

Darkening with "Multiply" will apparently work on screen zoom < 100% - but this is the old familiar screen scaling artifact. At 100% it has no effect, and it has no effect on the original image pixels.

[RobertHD05]

Thanks Fosse. The bitmap thing had me going for a while. Eventually I was able to create a 'Background" of the image and save it as a .jpg. Then I could work with it a little. How do I scan in anything other than bitmap?  I have a an older 16 bit Epson scanner I hook up to my WinXP box with Photoshop CS5 then save it to my network and open it and work with it in CC. I would like to find a way to make all those gray pixels turn into solid black.  I am having my friend try to find the originals so I can either scan them directly or shoot them with my camera on a stand.  Thanks -- Robert