When scanned line art has a dingy gray background instead of pure white, there's a simple way to clean up the background without unduly affecting the rest of the image. To demonstrate this technique, let's clean up the background of the scan shown in Figure A using Adobe Photoshop.
As you can see, our scan's background is a tint of gray instead of pure white. To change the tint background to white, use the Levels command to set the background tint as the image's new white point. Doing so remaps pixels with a gray-to-almost-white tonal range to white.