Black & White Negative Dust Removal

WooHoo! I’ve been troubled by the problem of removing the inevitable dust marks and scratches acquired in processing black and white film for ages. They generally don’t show when you’re printing them direct from the neg, but when you scan and then import into PS they can often look awful. ICE and all the other scanning plugins work a treat on slide film, but they are nigh on useless with B&W.

That was until I discovered a PS plugin from Polaroid (http://www.polaroid.com/service/software/poladsr/poladsr.html). Its like 6 years old and written for PS5, so I was dubious that it would work with CS3, but lemme tell ya, its like a dream come true! It’s not the most reliable piece of software and it stops responding regularily. Oh and its a real struggle to change the settings, but what you get from hours of cloning and touching up pales into insignificance with 2 clicks of a mouse!

Quite hard to demonstrate here as you really need to see it at 100%, but even reduced to this size you can see the difference.

Before
After

Well done Polaroid! But please could you update it so its more stable in CS3? (I can dream can’t I???)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 3:10 pm. It is filed under Photography and tagged with Black & White, dust, negatives, scanning, scratches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.