Hi, all--
I have to back up a little bit about my "glowing review" of Photoshop's Dust
& Scratches filter (Sunday's post?). If you're doing animals & particularly
wild-life photography, you *don't* want to use it. I just tried it on a cat
(original size on neg about 1/2 centimeter) and even at 2700ppi and a
threshhold of 1 pixel, the texture of the fur pretty much "went away." So
it's pretty unforgiving where small detail is concerned.
That may leave some newer scanning people (like me) wondering how to handle
dust etc. on a pic with fine detail. My best luck, to date (in Photoshop),
has been with the layer/erase method--Select All, Copy, Add Layer and Paste.
*Then* you can use the dust filter on the Background Layer and go nuts if
you want to--5-pixel, 10-pixel threshhold, blur the crap out of it--what the
hey, just get rid of that dust!
Then you switch back to the well-focused layer and do your spotting with the
Eraser. Those spots will be blurred, of course, but not very noticeable.
Note--some details will need the Ruber Stamp tool, so do those before you
erase very much, because the tool won't reach into the background for color,
<Or, Merge the layers, and then it will pick up anything you want it to.
It's a bit of a PITA, but it saves all but 0.0001% (aproximately, guys,
*aproximately*!) of the detail.
BTW, Mike and Eli (if you're reading), using that Raw Scan Method, I'm
*flying* through these scans using VueScan with my Acer (well, it's a
relative term ;-)). And now, that optional Preview Strip idea someone
suggested to Ed seems like a *realy prime* idea! Probably be a bugger to
program, but boy! would it speed the workflow!
(Good reason for a preview strip, Ed, is that you don't necessarily want to
print every shot you take--well, I don't, anyway--and the preview would let
you select which ones to use scanning/retouching time on).
Best regards--LRA
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