Tricked my OCR tool into reading a blurry receipt from 2019

I had a stack of old handwritten invoices that wouldn't scan right, so I ran them through an AI upscaler first and then fed the crisp version into my text extractor, worked on the third try. Anyone else use that two-step approach or is there a better way to handle faded paper?

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averywright21d ago

Have you tried messing with the color channels before you upscale? I had a stack of receipts that were basically yellow paper with faded blue ink, and boosting the blue channel first made the text pop way better than any AI upscaler could. Sometimes the sharpening just makes the blur and the paper texture fight each other, but messing with the contrast curves first is the real secret. Takes a minute in any free photo editor but saves you from running the whole pipeline twice.