Optimising illustrations - drawn on coloured paper

In my job I'm often required to work with scanned illustrations and optimise them for print.
But my latest job has been printed on coloured paper! Argh! It's an original, like the Illustrations were drawn right onto the book and then the pages laminated. It's a nightmare. I've tried messing around with the colour balance, and (god forbid) the Hue/Saturation sliders, but with no luck. If I manage to neutralise one part of the illustration, the rest is still out of whack (too green for example). There are dozens of pages for me to fix and I think it would be much too tedious to trace them in Illustrator or even to manually fix the colour balance of separate sections of each illustration. They are rough illustrations with black outlines but dark coloured fills. So Photoshop's threshold feature doesn't work well, and the Live Trace feature of Illustrator would fail miserably too.
Does anyone know an easier way around this? Possibly more automated than manually tracing and filling the illustrations?

Thanks Peter. I tried all of the suggested techniques, and your curves technique helped the most. It made the outlines of the illustration clearer at least. But even after some fiddling around, I think the only way I can get rid of the paper colour is to try and trace the outlines in Illustrator, then use fill paths to manually colour the illustration.
I'm not sure if I was following Mylenium's instructions correctly but I made 3 layers, one with the original scan, an inverted copy of the original with screen blending mode applied and another copy on top of that with overlay blending mode applied. That made it look washed out though...

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I fixed it eventually...sorry I meant to post a message.
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This question was solved.
View Solution.

Hi,
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Say "Thanks" by clicking the Kudos Star in the post that helped you.
Although I work for HP my posts and replies are my own
Please mark the post that solves your problem as "Accepted Solution"

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Optimising illustrations - drawn on coloured paper

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