Dust & Scratch Removal Plug-In

There is a downloadable Photoshop plug-in for dust and scratch removal

offered by Polaroid. Apparently it works universally on all kinds of

film, including those not supported by "Digital Ice", such as black

and white and Kodachrome. I will purchase a scanner with "Digital

Ice," but still need dust and scratch removal for b&w and Kodachrome.

Will anyone who has used Polaroid's software please comment on its

effectiveness and ease in removing dust and scratches? Thank you.

Why don't you try it? I have only played with it a little so far but it seems to work well. While I haven't used it on any high res scans to test for any image quality loss, It saved a lot of time despotting some smaller images. I had them digitally printed at 5X7 and they looked sharp!

 

BTW I do have a polaroid scanner.

Interesting piece of software! Even in fully automatic mode (haven't had time to test manual selection myself) it does a pretty good job. I'm attaching a section of a 2700dpi image I had partially cleaned by hand myself, but where the software spotted quite a few specks I had left out. I considered uploading a resized version of the full image, but resampling it to a manageable size does remove a lot of specks by itself.

 

That, by the way, is yours truly at something like two or three.

 

Thanks for mentioning the software, Neil. Now I only need something to clean up images where the negative was somewhat damaged.

 

Cheers!<div></div>

It's here:<p>

 

<a href="http://www.polaroid.com/service/software/poladsr/poladsr.html">http://www.polaroid.com/service/software/poladsr/poladsr.html</a>

It may be just me, but I've had very little luck with this software. It made a mess of images when I used auto mode (perhaps I don't understand the settings) and when I used manual mode, it took so long to individually mark dust, THEN scratches in a second pass (can't do both at once), that I decided it was faster and more efficient for me just to use Photoshop and the Healing Brush. If there are some tips for using it, I'd like to hear them so I can try a different approach.

It works well on scans of transparency films because the spots are black. It is not quite as useful on negative film because it interferes with small highlights. Try with the tile zize about 1/3 from the bottom, the mask size at min and the defect level at about 1 on the scale with adaptive filtering on. Feathering is at max this seems to work with most size images.

Tried this on freshly scanned and quite clean provia 100:

 

ALMOST complete clean-up of all of the few, small diameter black spots. I used the photoshop plugin, with every slider pushed all the way over to left except the correction one which I set up just one click. For some reason it left a very occasional speck, why I don't know.

 

Seems to really suck with my black and white scans of old, rough shape tri-x.

 

CAVEAT: I was all set to start using this on my provia slide scans till I checked histogram after the treatment. It looks like a pet flea comb, was almost completely smooth prior to treatment. Bottom line, I'll pass, for now.

 

My usual cleaning technique employs dust and and scratch/noise added snapshot in conjuction with history brush (per Ian Lyons Tutorial at www.digitaldarkroom.com), and occasional healing brush or clone stamp for larger blems and scratches.

 

By the way, it's not a big file so no big deal but, has anyone figured out how to unistall. No explanation is given, and it doesn't show up my WinXP add/remove programs list...