Some assistance for Tom_Knoebel

Hi Tom, looking through the Canon FD photos for the month I noticed your comments about wanting to clean up your slides for scanning.

In the past I have attempted 'wet' cleaning of slides using PEC pads and its companion fluid but there is a high risk of physical damage to the slide with this approach.

I now just attempt to clean up the scans in post processing. I'm having a lot of success with the old Polaroid Dust and Scratch cleaner software followed up with the spot healing and clone stamp tools in Photoshop, ( I think that the GIMP software has similar tools).

You have to be careful with Polaroid tool as it often identifies fine details as 'defects' which it will attempt to clean. When using this software I will create the cleaning mask with conservative settings and then examine the mask created by the software before actually cleaning the image. At this stage you have the opportunity to use the 'eraser' tool to remove the mask from areas of detail before comitting to the cleaning process. If you apply the Polaroid software with a heavy hand it will reward you with lots of donut shaped artifacts as a result of its processing. Particularly noticeable in areas of foliage where a tree is backlit etc. All of those small gaps between leaves are seen as defects and are not processed properly. Just remove the red mask dots and re-examine the areas after Polaroid has done its job.

After saving the cleaned image you can the proceed to manually spot the remaining defects in PS / GIMP. The Polaroid Dust and scratch tool is still up on the web - just google pdsr1_0.exe.

I took the liberty of doing some cleanup on your two images. Probably spent about 15 mins on each of them to give a quick idea of what can be done.

I hope that this can be of some assistance to you.

Cheers, Martin