[filmscanners] Re: Polaroid Dust and Scratch Removal

["Arthur Entlich" <artistic-1@shaw.ca>]

I have not installed the release version of this software yet, but I
worked with it in several versions in beta for months, and spent many
long nights helping it along to its final version 1.0.

This software is not a replacement for IR cleaning, but then again it
doesn't really need to be on a Polaroid scanner.  After all, Polaroid
scanner simply do not suffer from the problems that Nikon's manifest
from dust and scratches, so why should it be designed to fix Nikon's
problems?

I think it is rather nice of Polaroid to have decided to give this plug
in/stand alone for free to anyone who downloads it, regardless of the
scanner type (of course, that could change if too many non-Polaroid
clients start downloading it, who knows)  I can tell you that a lot of
time and effort went into coding, beta testing and debugging it.

The principle advantages of this over dICE, are:

1- it's free, and added no cost to the scanner, and retrofits to all
previous scanners
2- once you get to understand it, it is faster than dICE
3- you can work on specific areas of the image, if you want to
4- it works with any film, regardless of emulsion type (I haven't tested
in on black and white, but it probably works on some level)
5- it can be used at any point in the post scanning process

What it doesn't do:

1- it is not an answer to major overall problem defects like fungus or
fingerprints
2- It is not automatic, although there are some default settings which
provide a basic process, using the PS plug in

As has been discussed many times before, the Polaroids don't suffer from
major problems with dirt, dust and scratches, so the software is just a
bonus in most cases.  It's nice to have with a particularly dusty or
scratched image.  Polaroid seemed to have put the money into the scanner
rather than things which would have been bells and whistles for their
scanners.  In the Nikon case, they really had no choice but provide an
IR cleaning facility, and it shows up in the cost.  On rare
circumstances (like fungused slides or badly fingerprinted ones), it
becomes a real asset, but those cases aren't that common for most of us.

Art

joel@perfect-flight.com wrote:

> Hmmm.  When David H. had mentioned this in the past, he said it would
> look for a Polaroid scanner on your system before it would run or
> install.  This download installed fine and runs on my system which just
> has a Nikon scanner.  Either they are giving this out to the world for
> free, or they forgot something somewhere.
>
> I'm just starting to play with it, but so far, I don't see any magic
> compared to IR based cleaning.
>
> Joel Rittvo
>


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