The big headache with yearbook pictures is the halftone dots.
The best solution I’ve found is to scan at a fairly high resolution – 300 to 600 pixels per inch, then use the freeware FFT plugin to remove the dots while preserving detail reasonably well. Once you have a good image, resize to your pixel dimensions if necessary.
Here’s an article I did some time ago that shows how to do this. Scroll down to the example with the picture of the wrench to see what this method will do. Later there is a discussion of how to use this plugin in Elements as well as Photoshop.
http://www.curvemeister.com/forum/index.php?topic=62.0 —
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com/forum/