Expert: Glen Demers - 7/9/2008

Question
i have a lot of fotos that were scanned in before with

a scanner that was not so perfect.

i know it would be better to directly just use digital camera or 2nd best scan from negative but these are fotos

or 10 plus years.

so off to fotoshop i went using the healing brush tool i think that is it name.

BUT it takes me like 30-60 minutes for every foto just

to clean up the dust particles and blue line from the defective scanner.

this is way to time consuming. we are talking like in the

hundreds of hours.

i think i have the older version of photoshop before the cs came out.

do the newer versions have any automatic way of doing it

or any ways i could speed it all up?.

perhaps other programs?

thanking you in advance.

Answer
Hi Jii,

The easiest way to get rid of dust in old photos is to go to Filters/Noise/Dust & Scratches and apply it with a setting of between 1 and 3, enough to get rid of the dust marks without blurring the image to much. Apply,  then check the box in the History Palette beside Dust & Scratches to load the history brush and go back 1 level in History, back to before you did the filter. Then select the history brush (y) and set the mode to Darken, this will quickly eliminate the dust marks that show up white in your image while leaving the image itself virtually untouched. Setting the mode to lighten will eliminate the black dust marks in transparency scans. You can quickly brush a picture this way to eliminate dust then change to the healing tool (j) for cleaning up the bigger spots.
You can try automating this by making an action that applies the Dust and Scratches filter to every image but this will end up blurring everything, by using the brush, you eliminate the dust only in the areas that you want and leave the lighter areas untouched.
If the blue line is straight, you can clone an area near it and click on one end with the stamp tool(s) then shift click on the other end, this will fill in the line quickly.
Hope this helps and speeds up your workload
Glen