Cleaning really dusty scans

MM
Posted By
Mick_Murphy
Feb 6, 2004
Views
648
Replies
14
Status
Closed
I normally don’t have dust problems as I usually scan slides with ICE and dust spots have become a thing of the past for me.

Now I’ve just received a pile of dusty old prints to scan and prepare for web use. There are too many and time is too short to spend ages spotting them with the healing brush. Any quick tips or pointers to good tutorials on doing quick and dirty cleanups? I know I’ve seen various tips including one which suggested creating two layers and doing some blurring, nudging and blending but I really can’t remember where I saw this and what exactly was suggested. Any tips gratefully received.
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MM
Mick_Murphy
Feb 6, 2004
I’ve just realised that unsharp mask was turned on by default in the Epson flatbed scanner software and this was a major part of the problem. Turning this off plus a quick wipe of the print with lintless tissue before scanning seems to have solved a lot of my problems. Nevertheless, any pointers still gratefully received.
DN
Douglas_Nelson
Feb 6, 2004
There are many techniques for this, everyone has their favorite. One quick way is to dupe the image layer, apply D/S until the marks are completly gone, then move it below the original layer and set the blending mode of the original to darken.

—
– Doug Nelson

==============================
http://www.retouchpro.com — the #1 online community for retouchers and restorers
MM
Mick_Murphy
Feb 6, 2004
Thanks Doug. I’ve been meaning to learn some more advanced retouching techniques so I’ll probably spend a bit of time on retouchpro. I see you have a lot of images posted.
P
pope
Feb 6, 2004
Mick…try: < http://www.polaroid.com/service/software/poladsr/poladsr.htm l>

This is a free plugin and works very well on dust and scratches. Also runs as a standalone.
MM
Mick_Murphy
Feb 7, 2004
Thanks pope. I’m going to start scanning some dusty 20 year old prints so I’ll give this a try.

I’ve just spent a couple of hours browsing retouchpro. I didn’t realise it was Doug’s site on my previous post. Great stuff Doug. One could spend weeks in there. I’ll be back.
LH
Lawrence_Hudetz
Feb 7, 2004
The Polaroid is slooooow!

Nice tip about the D&S on a separate layer. Even with the layer blending, won’t it also wreck detail?
BO
Burton_Ogden
Feb 7, 2004
Mick,

Now I’ve just received a pile of dusty old prints to scan and prepare for web use.

First thing I would do is take them outside, one by one, and try to blow the dust off physically with some canned air. Also, one of those polonium strip brushes might be effective at brushing off the dust. You might not be able to physically remove all of the dust, but you should be able to reduce the workload for your software. Also, the remaining dust may be logically equivalent to noise, so I would try the Neat Image software. I pretty much routinely run Neat Image anyway. They have a free downloadable demo.

<http://www.neatimage.com>

— Burton — (not associated with Neat Image)
DN
Douglas_Nelson
Feb 7, 2004
Lawrence:

Certainly it can affect detail to some degree, but I’ve found D/S tends to make light areas darker more than vice versa, so using the blend mode keeps light areas intact. You can also modify it with masks, or only apply it only to large areas of limited detail such as walls or sky.

I wouldn’t recommend it for fixing tears or other large defects, but it can be useful for dust specks, especially if a large threshold value is used.

Generally, I’ll view the image at 200% and toggle the D/S layer on and off. Areas of critical detail that have been degraded will be obvious, and I’ll add a mask to protect those areas.

—
– Doug Nelson

==============================
http://www.retouchpro.com — the #1 online community for retouchers and restorers
FN
Fred_Nirque
Feb 7, 2004
Doug,

I threw your technique over to that stroppy bunch on the Mac forum who were giving Dale (klikman) a really hard time on the "Pebbled surface prints scanning" thread. I hope you don’t mind – I credited you anyway.

That’s a nifty shortcut to the old D&S + History Brush technique. Thanks.

Fred.
DN
Douglas_Nelson
Feb 7, 2004
Fred:

No problem, I’ve been following that thread.
But to be honest, I’ve never been able to get the technique to work well with heavily textured prints 🙂

—
– Doug Nelson

==============================
http://www.retouchpro.com — the #1 online community for retouchers and restorers
FN
Fred_Nirque
Feb 7, 2004
Doug,

Yeah, I figured as much as in the disclaimer I added. However, in the removal of small white spots or grain after sharpening this is going to save me huge amounts of time without destroying the image. Thanks again.

Fred.
MM
Mick_Murphy
Feb 7, 2004
Lawrence – I tried out the Polaroid as a plugin and I didn’t find it particularly slow – about 16s on a 50Mb image which is not intolerable. I’m not sure how good it is though because I haven’t figured out exactly what the controls do. It certainly works well on removing noise from bland areas such as sky but it does some pretty weird things to contrasty areas at the default settings.

Doug’s tip works well on dark areas with light spots. I’ll have to try it out on a few skies and see what happens.

Burton – thanks for the additional tips. I’m ok for now with this bunch of prints as the main problem was the coarse unsharp mask in the scanner software.
P
pope
Feb 7, 2004
The polaroid filter is brutal on some things…like tree branches, teeth, eyes. I usually apply the filter to a copy, add a mask and areas such as a model’s eyes I paint with black so the original eyes show through and then spot manually.

One other thing is on sky and bland areas I select with magic wand then contract the selection about 5 – 10 pixels so branches, foliage, etc won’t get that hollowed out look.

My files average 70MB. The filter is a bit slow but spotting an entire image would be much slower.
H
Ho
Feb 8, 2004
Filter>Blur>Average (PSCS only), then Edit>Fade Blur (Color blend mode 50-75%) can work wonders on solid color areas.

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