DNG workflow for healing dust and spots

Guides and How-Tos
1

Please, how would you manage your forkflow, if you want clean dust and spots in PS and then use NLP and all export in LR? There is no way to edit DNG and save it as DNG in PS. Export it as TIF than makes no sense, since I can scan to TIFs directly (but miss those DNG compatibility with NLP). I don’t want to clean dust and spots from exported and converted JPGs, this is not bulletproof workflow for editing originals in future. Thanks.

2

I’m certainly no ‘expert’; but surely if you ‘bit-edit’ the spots out you (a) have converted to a non-RAW file (b) are alterering the original… thence negating the whole point of remaining ‘inside’ RAW/DNG.
You can ‘spot’ from LightRoom or similar, which does not alter the original file, but saves the ‘spot instruction’ back into the DNG.
Or am I mis-reading your requirement?
Hope some help
Les

3

LR heal spot is time consuming and not suitable for advance dust cleaning. So I need make this step in PS, where healing tools are much more complex and faster than in LR. However I cannot export from PS DNG, so its a trap!

4

Wouldn’t it be easier to avoid dust in the first place with a rocket blower and anti-static cloth? Any possible dust left could be easily removed within lightroom.

5

It is not enough unfortunately. So I would like to use tools that I pay for properly. PS healing tools are really powerful and with Wacom cintiq very effective and fast to do. LR healing spot is useless in this case. I’m not trying to say that this is NLP problem, just need to find out right workflow. I have around 10k pictures to scan and most of them need to be restored properly.

6

i also already scanned my archive before i got nlp for lightroom, and i scanned about one hundred rolls in tiff type with 4 channel (rgb + infrared mask of dust). so now i use nlp in the follow way:

  1. open tiff in photoshop, apply action made in advance for autamatic remove all dust and spots based on infrared channel, delete the orange mask, save as tiff file.
  2. convert got tiff file to dng in vuescan
  3. open dng in lightroom and use NLP
7

Hi sarzhan, can you explain how you automatic remove all dust and spots based on IR channel? Is this an action and could you share it, please?
Thanks

8

Hi,
I don’t know if this answers solves your concern but have you tried to - after re-importing the Ps files in Lr - go to "Library / Convert photos to DNG "?
Accessorily, what is the difference between using NLP on raw files versus Ps files?

9

hi, sorry for the late answer.
look: you should open tiff scan in ps, by the way tiff must have 4 channels: red, green, blue and alpha.
next step you select alpha channel and put it on new layer under you scan, after that apply curves with the extreme contrast. in result you mignt see just dust and scratches. → you make the selection of chanell for this layer and based on this selection you make invisible the curves and layers with the dust and apply fill operation based on rest of pictures. so this way you can remove all dust and scratchers which are in your alpha channel.
after that usually i save updated scan with three channels (without alpha) as tiff file, open it in vuescan and save as dng type. The future steps you know yourself)