IMSLP:High Quality Scanning

This should only be a simple cookbook for one way to scan music scores and clean them from dust and dirt artifacts. It is the technique I (PiuPianissimo) used to produce a few scanned scores you can find on IMSLP.

1. Scan the score in 1200dpi monochrome, avoid any skew (as good as possible).
2. Use the quality filter of the Photoline software (a 30 day trial can be downloaded) with 4 points size.
3. Clean the remaining dust manually and add missing black by painting.
4. Change the page size and borders to the values of the original.
5. Scale the page to 600dpi.

Nothing more and nothing less.
The full procedure takes for me between 15 and 30 minutes for each page, so at least 5 hours for a score of 20 pages. Of course this depends on the quality of the original score.

Here there is an example that points out the three states of the scanning and cleaning process (of course the images are huge even though they are only parts of the whole page, as they are scanned 1200dpi). It is page 149 of the Chopin Klindworth edition (Op.66) - you can find the whole score here.
Stage 1: the original image after scanning

Stage 2: after running the filter

Stage 3: after cleaning manually