For the most part I use Adobe Acrobat 11 to convert most scans and photos to pdfs, or to sort out scanned books and recognize text. I've used ABBYY reader in the past, and found it alright. However, I have a large cache of digital photographs of manuscripts and samples of handwriting that I want to be able to manipulate. Old versions of Microsoft Office used to have a picture editor that worked well for adjusting brightness, colors, tones, white balance, etc. but I can't seem to find it for Windows 7.
I imagine Adobe Photoshop would work, but I'm not looking for something as powerful and expensive. Just software that will allow me to manipulate the image to get a better sense of the handwriting, and reduce the background color is what I need.
Any help is appreciated.
Just to check, you're not trying to make very faded writing legible, just improve the appearance of already (to the eye on the original document) readable handwriting?
I use Photoshop, because I have the full Adobe get up for work. However you can totally use the free alternative GIMP for what you're doing, though it is powerful and has a steep learning curve just like Photoshop. I've found ABBYY's preprocessing is pretty good at making it legible to the human eye though, by merit of trying to make it legible to OCR. If you want the barest of bare bones, Google Photo's built in photo editor does color and brightness adjustment.