Do you guys have any “non-manual” dirt and scratches removal techniques in PS?
I fiddle with dirt and scratches as as tool to form a selection, expand it slightly, and heal the selection with content aware fill or healing brush …
Any better ideas or processes?
I primarly use the heal tool in lightroom, or if things are particularly messy, the remove tool in Photoshop.
I’ve also found AI GenFill can be a bit useful for large damaged sections, but that is of course Cheating (/s)
Thanks. I was more thinking of “not out of the box” and “non manual” techniques. I am playing around with forging a selection wit dust and scratches or xSRD and then using content aware or healing brush on the selected defects …
The problem remains the imperfect dirt selection making it inferior to ICE.
It is worth noting, that Digital ICE, in many instances and especially when coupled with a diffuse illumination scheme, doesn’t actually replace the pixel data, but rather boosts it to restore normal looking scans, where some of the image data is obstructed by dirt/debris.
As such, any solution that uses a binary mask of pixels to heal/replace tends needs to be better at the finding replacement data, than the method used in DICE.
How can you use ICE with diffuse light? It works only in scanners by employing an IR pass.
Digital ICE is more of a method than a specific implementation. It has been employed in consumer scanners employing both collimated illumination schemes (Nikon Coolscan LS-40, LS-50, LS-5000, Minolta Multi Pro) as well as diffuse illumination schemes (Nikon Coolscan LS-9000, Minolta Elite 5400 etc). Infrared radiation can be subject to diffusion just like visible light and using a diffuse light source to begin with and hence supressing dust/scratches, the part of the image that needs to be “healed” by making up pixel data(inpainting we call this in the field of computer vision) is reduced, because a larger portion of the identified defects can be recovered by simply boosting the values that were measured.
Interesting – I didn’t know light sources in scanners can be diffused.
However, this has not much to do with the topic and my inquiry. Obviously we cannot recreate ICE process with DSLR unless we remove IR filer from the sensor etc …
So I am looking if someone has a good method to selecting those defects and dirt without the ICE hardware aproach … Once they are selected fixing them is not a problem.
I use the “Inpainting Brush Tool” in “Affinity Photo” which works brilliantly but is a manual method.
For negs with major overall dust, scratch or mould problems I would be interested if anyone has experience with software such as SilverFast SRDx or any others out there?
xSRD is doing it’s job solidly. Far from ICE but but better than PS dust and scratches. The xSRD impainting is bad, however that can be remedied by turning it into a selection via leyer difference mode and impaint selection by content aware fill or healing brush.
The problem is that the price of this plugin is a bit steep for what it does.