Dust on scanned prints

[rob_w]

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A family member asked me to scan a bunch of favourite prints recently and they have come up well, except for the tiny dust particles which remained even after cleaning.  Is there a way in lightroom (or other) to remove or minimise them?  We are not talking about extreme high quality expectations, just something tidy.  I have searched the forum but cannot find anything relevant so far.

Thanks

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[Stuart Richardson]

If you have access to lightroom, you probably have access to photoshop. If you do, it is a much much better solution than Lightroom. The reason for this is that it is a pixel level editor, unlike Lightroom. For general dust spotting of a few spots, it is best to use the spot healing brush. That will give the most seamless result without touching the overall photo. The only downside to this method is time...depending on how dirty the prints are, and how long you have to spend, it can be impractical.

If your photos are covered with lots and lots of dust, there are some options like the Dust and Scratches filter. It is a bit risky and takes finesse to adjust the level of blurring (radius and threshold etc) such that it does not affect the main image detail while still removing the dust. Generally this filter works best for prints over film, as the dust on prints tends to be very sharp (when scanned), and the prints themselves are inherently softer, as they are enlargements. This works best on older, softer originals like darkroom prints from older cameras...the prints are not that sharp to begin with, so the blurring of the filter does not affect it. I have had to resort to this on occasion when printing for museums if they are doing archival images from their collection, which tend to be dusty or damaged. When using this filter, it can be enough to do it at a low level to take care of the small dust, and then go back through and take the more substantial pieces out with the spot healing brush. The dust and scratches filter is kind of a nuclear option, so it is best to use it as sparingly as you can. 

[roydonian]

A couple of weeks ago I used my BEOON stand to digitise about 100 Leica negatives taken by my father some 60 years ago. Several minutes work on each image using Photoshop's Spot Healing Brush Tool was enough to remove all major dust artifacts.

[philipus]

In my experience Photoshop's spot healing brush is the way to go almost all the time. And it can be very time-consuming depending on the image.

Global adjustments like the dust and scratches filter, or the FlexTouch filter in Hasselblad's FlexColor, are not reliable and actually create more work than they remove since it will virtually always be necessary to look over the image at 100% to check what remains after the filter. In addition such filters will affect the general sharpness of the scan too, though that can be dealt with afterwards by clever use of sharpening. 

It also depends on how picky you need/wish to be and, importantly, how large the final files need to be. One little piece of trickery is to scan at higher resolution (up to the max optical resolution of the scanner, not to any of those silly interpolated resolutions that just bloat the files) and then resize the image to the output size. This will shrink the dust etc and quite effectively (depending on how much smaller the image gets) "remove" dust spots. After the resize the use of the spot healing brush should take less time.

If the images are on colour negatives or positives and you have access to the films and a scanner with Digital ICE an option could to scan the films themselves. ICE is very effective, but it won't work on black and white films (with the exception of those, like XP2, that are developed in C41 chemicals).

Just a few ideas.

Philip

 

On 12/20/2021 at 1:58 PM, rob_w said:

A family member asked me to scan a bunch of favourite prints recently and they have come up well, except for the tiny dust particles which remained even after cleaning.  Is there a way in lightroom (or other) to remove or minimise them?  We are not talking about extreme high quality expectations, just something tidy.  I have searched the forum but cannot find anything relevant so far.

Thanks

[erudolph]

I had to spot several hundred negatives from the 1930s and 40s.  I found the SRDx plug-in for Photoshop a fantastic time saver.  It did require some intervention on my part, in terms of what not to let the plug-in correct, and there is a small learning curve.

 

https://www.picture-plugins.com/

Edited February 12, 2022 by erudolph

[marchyman]

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I use the heal tool in Lightroom.   But first I start with the scan.

Start with a very clean scan bed.  After basic cleaning I use an anti static brush.  I use a rocket blower on the bed and on the prints before placing prints on the bed.  If necessary I'll also use the anti-static brush on the prints.  In some cases I may even wipe the prints down with some 99% Isopropyl alcohol sprayed onto a pec pad. The print has to be pretty  bad for me to do that as I could wind up adding scratches.

Anyway, my goal is to minimize the dust that I need to fix in post.  For negatives and slides I've stopped using a scanner and instead use my dslr holding the negatives in  the Essential Film Holder (https://clifforth.co.uk).  I find dust is less of an issue this way, but I'm not sure why.  Perhaps my scanner is a dust magnet.

[philipus]

Hi Ed

Thank you very much for drawing my attention to this plugin, which I didn't know. I'm happy it worked for you. I'm always looking for ways to shorten the time spent dust spotting and so tested it now on a few images but it just didn't pick up on dust well enough for me regardless of which settings i tried.

Here are two examples of 120 film scanned on my Flextight X1. I'm really surprised that SRDx didn't manage to notice almost any of the white dust spots on the first image and also that it failed to see the remaining spots (if few) on the second image since that one is much less "messy" in terms of image detail. Looks like I won't be giving any money to Lasersoft, but I hope other photographers will have better luck than I did.

Cheers

Philip

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20 hours ago, erudolph said:

I had to spot several hundred negatives from the 1930s and 40s.  I found the SRDx plug-in for Photoshop a fantastic time saver.  It did require some intervention on my part, in terms of what not to let the plug-in correct, and there is a small learning curve.

 

https://www.picture-plugins.com/