Best way to sharpen vintage book iilustration

[Little Owl]

Hi,

I used to use Serif's draw, photo & publisher but have started using the new Affinity range for most projects. I'm able to create new vectors ok in designer but never really did much with photo before or using scanned images as the basis for a project.

I have been playing around with different options in Affinity designer & photo, watching video tuts etc but still can't achieve the result I want in this case.

I have images scanned from old books that I want to enlarge, convert to a black & white, sharpen & delete the background. Then it will be exported as a PDF to be made into a stencil using a photo sensitive mesh medium that allows for detailed stencils. The process requires a black & white reasonably crisp image but the imperfections in these old illustrations are part of the charm, so want to sharpen etc but don't need to be exactly like a vector in clarity.

Image attached - it's original size is 608 x 435 pixels. I want it to be enlarged to around 1000 x 715 for this project. It is also darker on one side than the other, so I would like to even the image up a bit as well.

Hope you can offer some suggestions as to what adjustments/filters etc to use.  

[lacerto]

(...)

[John Rostron]

I tried a similar procedure to @Lagarto:

1. I first resized the document 200% using Lanczos non-separable, then cropped it to 1000px wide.
2. I applied a Threshold adjustment at around 80% which set all the background to white.
3. I then selected the white background using the Flood Select Tool with the Contiguous checkbox unticked. This selected all the white background.
4. I then deleted the selection and de-selected it. I also removed a few stray spots of black. 

The entire procedure took about ten minutes.

This is also one of those cases where a one-bit colour mode would be desirable!

Result attached:

John

[Little Owl]

Thanks for the helpful replies - much appreciated.

I tried out the different suggestions, but in the end found a quicker way by just playing about that suited the end result I needed.

After enlarging the image as above I created a duplicate of the image.

On one image I used new adjustment > levels> selected colour type as grey. I then increased the black level to enhance the image & reduced the white level to make the background white. I then applied a filter > sharpen> unsharp mask & played around with the settings  to sharpen it without getting to jaggy.

I then did the same with the duplicate but making it a tad lighter, cropped the image to leave just the left side flowers. Then used the erase tool to remove bits I didn't need & placed it over the other image, matching it up, grouped the lot & exported. I also used the erase tool to clean up a few spots on both images.

Probably totally unconventional but what ever works I'm good with.  

Image attached - what do you think?