On Thursday, October 24, 2002, at 10:04 AM, Lon Williamson wrote:
Folks, I believe I've stumbled upon a useful thing.
I have created a Photoshop Action that, on a reasonable
percentage of scans thrown at it, reduced spotting time
considerably. The action can remove most spots from
negative scans semi-automatically without - repeat:
WITHOUT - affecting sharpness or contrast. It is
particularly handy when thrown at negative film developed
at ham-handed 1 hour labs. As written, it will NOT
effectively spot chromes, where dust manifests as dark
abberations. I may work on a chrome version later.
By semiautomatically, I mean that there are user-intervention
steps (adjusting levels, applying blur, and choosing values
for a few dust&scratch filters). There are currently 78 steps
in the action and user intervention is required on 7 steps.
Only two of these steps require you to do some careful
tweaking which may take 30 seconds or so, the other 5 steps
take me less than 5 seconds each.
I have found myself spending typically 30 minutes to over
an hour retouching by hand using the classic history-brush-and-
scratch-filter and even more classic clone tool approach on
the 50MB 8-bit TIF files my scanner cranks out. It does not
have FARE or ICE. With PMI (PoorMan'sIce), my spotting time
can be as little as 10 minutes to as much as 30 minutes. PMI
spotting typically holds up well against 8x10 enlargements
printed on a modern inkjet photo-printer.
PMI works well on an eTower 333Mz machine with 256MB
RAM. It's considerably slower on a Fujitsu 400MHz laptop
with 192MB. It's probably workable, with 50MB TIFs, on
a machine with 128MB, and would no doubt fly on a machine
with 512 or more MB and a processor in the Gigahertz speed
range.
I intend to release it as freeware soon, but want testers
and feedback before so doing. I hope that my testers
will come ONLY from PDML; and your names will be listed
in the final documentation.
I will email all interested testers the action and preliminary
documentation in ZIP format - should be around a megabyet.
The action was developed in PhotoShop 5 (my latest version),
and I tested a very early PIM version against Photoshop 6 which
did NOT fare well (Photoshop 6 does not, curiously enough,
support all actions that Photoshop 5 does). I may have found
a work around, but have not tested the current PMI against
Photoshop 6 or 7.
So to be safe, if you want to examine PMI, you should - at least
for now - have Photoshop 5 laying around somewhere. I am confident
that I can create a final version that supports everything from
Photoshop 4 to Photoshop 7, probably with a distinct action for
each version of Photoshop.
Anyone interested please respond to me via email
with title "PMI Tester"
- Lon Williamson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sounds great. If you want a tester for Photoshop 6 and 7, let me know.
Dan Scott
