Digital BW, The Print

Hmmm, personally I wouldn't have a use for it.  I don't have dust and scratches, except a 
very small amount on a few of my 35 year old negs (and not they are not much of a 
problem).

Am on a Mac (for your survery)

Scott

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "dealy663" <dealy663@h...> 
wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone, I've been a lurker in this group for a while, but haven't
> posted much.
> 
> I'm looking for some opinions on a dust and scratch removal program
> for scanned black and white film. I haven't been able to find anything
> that was really helpful in this regard, and got to thinking about
> creating something myself.
> 
> In some ways what I'm planning on developing would be similar to the
> Polaroid Dust removal program, but would make use of more
> sophisticated image analyis techniques. By this I mean, it would take
> into consideration the amount of film grain present (via the speed of
> the film and allowing the user to specify a level of "graininess").
> The size of of the film grain with respect to the size of the actual
> image on the negative would also figure into the dust/scratch
> selection algorithms.
> 
> This program would not be smart enough for you to set a couple of
> options and then presto you'd have something as clean as a Digital ICE
> repaired piece of color film (That seems unlikely for now). But would
> offer significantly less work than going through your file with the
> clone-stamp tool or the healing brush at 100% pixel resolution in
> Photoshop as I've usually done with my B/W scans. This whole process
> started after I spent about 2 hours cleaning up a scan of a 35mm Tri-X
> neg with the PS CS healing brush. By manually applying some of these
> techniques I was able to clean a similarly dirty neg in about 15
> minutes. I expect that I can build a PS CS plugin to do this
> relatively simple stuff without too much trouble. But the really cool
> benifit will arise if my ideas regarding automated dust and scratch
> identification pan out.
> 
> This probably wouldn't be of need to those who only have to clean up 5
> or 6 defects per image. I'm talking about really messed up negs with
> over 100 defects per image!
> 
> So here are my questions:
> 
> 1. Would such a program would be of interest to you B/W scanning
> types?
> 
> 2. If so would most of you be interested in a standalone application,
> or a Photoshop plugin that would work with 16-bit files? If I were to
> build a standalone program I would only code it to work with TIFF
> files.
> 
> 3. What percentage of those interested are on Macs vs PCs?
> 
> Thanks, Derek