Background removal and cleanup of book scan

[sovereign (Matteo Costa)]

@Morgan_Hardwood

Else in GIMP crop the image to the text, duplicate the layer, gaussian blur until you can’t see any trace of the letters (I used a value of 100 in this example), set the layer mode to divide (screenshot taken at this point), flatten the image, auto-levels and done.

One can improve further with high pass filter in overlay mode (sharpening) and final desaturation to remove any yellowish color trace.