Question : How can I easily remove lines from scanned notebook paper in Photoshop 7?
I’m a scatterbrain and lose things easily, so as part of a quest to stay organized I am planning to scan tons of notebook paper pages with blue lines. The blue lines scan to a fairly dark color and are especially obnoxious because it is graph paper, not horizontal-ruled paper, that I am scanning.

The file size of the scanned images is HUGE, even after I reduce the resolution and convert to gray scale. I think part of this is due to the stray flecks of color, as well as the lines, which don’t scan nice and cleanly, but instead scan irregularly, which leads to a large jpg size (I’m saving in jpg format, not zip, because zip seemed to create even larger files).

I tried scanning directly into Acrobat 5, but ended up with a 16MB file instead of a 4.5MB file when I combined 3 pages that are supposed to be a single file.

Any ideas? I am surprised because PDFs usually have a small file size, but these are coming up as between 0.5 and 1MB each.

I am using a CanoScan LiDE 60 scanner.
large format scanner

Best answer:

Answer by geek546
If you want to have smaller images scan at 75dpi.
If you want to reduce the “weight” of images, resize them to their real dimension (use Image menu>Image size). Instead of saving as jpg, use File>Save for Web and choose the PNG (24) format. This format utilizes lossless compression, meaning no image data is lost when saving or viewing the image. It is a universal format that is recognized by the World Wide Web consortium, and supported by modern web browsers.

Good work :)