How can I easily remove lines from scanned notebook paper in Photoshop 7?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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 :)