Improving scans with Photoshop

Before anyone laughs at me, yes I know I put in my interests section that I am good at photo restoration but keep in mind the "photo" part lol. I don't know how many of you do this or not but when I get a new CD I like to take the insert out and scan it into my computer to make an album art cover. Well the one issue I have is trying to make it a clean image, yes I know it starts with the scanning but I always get different results based on what I do. I start off by setting my scanner to 600 dpi. Yes 300 is good enough in most cases but I always prefer a larger source because it's always easier to scale an image down than it is to upscale one, also I'm more for quality.

The core problem I'm having is working with an image that large without having to scale it down first. Well after an hour or so I finally came up with these two versions after experimenting with some filters and adjustments, personally I feel the 2nd is much better. I'm still not completely satisfied with the results but if there is a way to improve them further I would more than accept a suggestion. In the future I'd like to just edit the large image perfectly and then scale down if needed because obviously music players will not accept a file that's 2000+ pixels large but that should be up to my discretion to do so and not have to do that just to make it look good. Sorry if none of this makes sense and if you need more information, I'd be more than happy to post whatever you need to know about my method of madness.


v1


v2

Also I'm aware of the irony, the week I get both the opening and ending theme CD's in the mail is the same week the show ends. Now listening to the songs makes me think of how it's going to be over (ToT)
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Here are some other ones I have done, some have been easier to do than others but as you can tell it's not always as simple as I would like it to be.

Exit Tunes Presents Megurhythm

- This was the first one I did where I decided to clean it up versus just a raw scan, took about 3 hours because I was very displeased with how things were going but in the end I managed to get the results I wanted. Incidentally this was also the very first Vocaloid related product I have ever had the pleasure to own.

Vocalo Mix 39

- As you can tell by this one, some of the image came out good but I still cannot remove that textured look. If I downscale the image more it works but I don't want to have to do that just to make the initial image look good.

JBF Remix

- I'm kind of surprised this one came out as good as it did because the book is very big and didn't fit in the scanner too well.

Beni Arashiro - Cherish

- This one's a bit old but still proves the point of how some result the way I want.

These are all down-scaled from the original scans because I'd be insane to try to embed those here. I think the page would take forever to load or worse, break the forum 0_0"