[help trying to make something darker]

hi guys sorry about the delay coming back to this thread,    first off thank you very much for the great suggestions

 

i certainly cant change the font unfortunately as i am helping someone who has scanned an old 6502 (close guess Ego Eram!) assembly language programming book -- there are over 400 pages he scanned so needless to say i wont be doing anything involving changing the font.  im just going to keep things sinple and as suggested here i have tried both the distort-morphology effect (erode) which seems to be just fine for this issue

and also thanks for the effects-noise median suggestion which also seems to be good

i will certainly use one of those above suggestions then

 

thanks again for the help

 

[help trying to make something darker]

hi i just signed up,  im having some trouble trying to make something darker when using paint.net

 

i have attached a pic,  at the top is the original image, and below, is how it looks after i applied (5 times) effects-->photo-->sharpen (at the maximum amount '20')

 

it does certainly look better after applying the maximum sharpening amount 5 times, but i was just wondering if anyone has any ideas as to perhaps other better ways i could make that text more readable?  or do u think that is pretty much as good as i can expect?   thanks