Easily removing ghost text while scanning

When scanning pages from books and magazines it is common to see a ‘ghost image’ of the text from the back side of the page being scanned.

There is an easy fix for this and it’s so obvious you will kick yourself

During the scan, simply place a sheet of flat matte black paper immediately behind the page you are scanning.
This destroys the contrast of the ‘ghost’ text or images rendering a much better quality scan with little to no visibility of the reversed image from the page behind and no visibility of the next page either (I have seen people use white paper, but this only solves part of the problem)

The one downside is that it reduces the contrast of the scanned image too, but that is easily fixed by adjusting the highlights – for example (if I remember correctly) by dragging the right hand slider to the left in the Photoshop ‘Levels’ tool

Please link to this one if you find it useful