Lynn wrote: "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."
Lynn, here's a technique for using dust and scratches successfully. You
never, ever want to just apply it to any image unless your purpose is to
blur it.
1. do your initial color space conversion and an initial levels/ curves
adj(if necessary)
2. save a snapshot of current state
3. run dust and scratches, checking the preview to make sure most of the
debris is caught by the filter
4. create a snapshot of the dust and scratches state, set it to history, and
revert to the previous snapshot
5. select the history brush and set it to lighten (if using transparency
film) or to darken (if using neg film); if you have a palette set options so
that pressure in "on" for size and "off" for opacity' set opacity to 100%;
choose a soft brush
The history brush should now work to remove most of the debris (setting the
tool to "lighten" or "darken" limits the effect to the spots you are aiming
at), but some debris will defeat the d/s filter (either it is just too much
for the settings you chose or is in an area where the contrast just isn't
enough for the "lighten"/ "darken" brush mode to work properly). For these
occasional spots I use the rubber stamp tool, reversing the palette options
so that opacity is set to "pressure" and size is set to "off."
I've been using this technique for some time now and hope it works for you.
Cathy
