Palm leaf manuscripts hold immense historical and cultural significance, particularly in Southern India, where they served as a primary means for recording religious texts, literature, and scholarly works. However, these manuscripts are highly vulnerable to deterioration due to factors like insect damage, environmental exposure, and the natural aging process. As a result, there is an urgent need for preservation and digitization to ensure their survival for future generations. Tigalari is a script known for its elegant, rounded characters and has historical ties to the Tulu language. It was used to write Tulu texts, a significant Dravidian language spoken in the coastal region of Tulu Nadu in southwestern Karnataka and parts of Kasargod. Tulu boasts rich oral traditions, including ballads, poetry, and local history, which are still actively practiced today. This paper presents a multi-stage binarization approach as an initial step in the digital preservation and character segmentation of historic Tigalari palm leaf manuscripts. By enhancing the image clarity, this approach aids in the recognition of Tigalari characters. A comparative analysis of various binarization techniques is provided, with results showing that the Sauvola Binarization technique performed the best in handling the complexities of the degraded manuscripts.