Lon Williamson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >...if you're doing your own developing, you'll get less spots and >scratches than if you let the 1-hour lab folks do it. Meaning, say, >15 minutes with the Photoshop Clone Brush instead of an hour and a half.
Here's a great way to speed up spot retouching of scanned negatives and slides in Photoshop (works in 7.0 - I'm not certain of earlier versions): Open your image in Photoshop, zoom to 100% and find some representative examples of the spots you want to retouch. Under the "Filter" menu, go to the "Noise" option and choose "Dust and Scratches". Adjust the radius control in the "Dust and Scratches" dialog until most or all of your annoying spots disappear. Your image will be hopelessly blurry at this point; don't worry about it. Click "OK". Now you have a blurry image with no dust spots. Go to the "History" palate (if you don't have it open, pull down the "Window" menu and click on "History"). Click on the history step that's immediately before (above) the "Dust and Scratches" step you just implemented (this will usually be "Open"). Now you'll be viewing the original image as it looked prior to the "Dust and Scratches" filter. You've essentially gone "back in time" to before used the filter and all your spots will be back. Now click on the "History brush" box next to the "Dust and Scratches" step in the History Palate. (This is the square box on the left edge of the History Palate, next to the "Dust and Scratches" step.) When you click on this box, a picture of a brush with a circular arrow should appear in it. Now go over to the Tools palate and select the History Brush tool (a brush with a circular arrow just like the smaller one you activated in the History palate). Set the brush size to about that of the spots you're going to retouch. I usually use a feathered edge brush. If you're retouching white spots on an image from a scanned negative, set the brush Mode (small drop-down box at top of screen - default setting is "Normal") to "Darken". If you're retouching dark spots on a scanned slide, set to "Lighten". Now use the History Brush on your spots. Every spot you hit will be "transported forward in time" to after the "Dust and Scratches" was applied. But ONLY that spot will be subject to the filter, not the entire image. I've been pretty detailed in this description, so it may look more complex than it is. Trust me, it's really fast to set up once you've done it for the first time. It's *vastly* faster than using the clone tool, especially for negs with a lot of spots. You may still need to use the clone tool afterwards if you have any really big spots or scratches, but the time saving is still enormous. -- Mark Roberts Photography and writing www.robertstech.com
