Digital BW, The Print

Hmmm, impossible, now that's a word we should all use everyday :-)

I'm not suggesting that I can make a program that will automagically remove 
all dust and scratches from any scanned B/W film. If I knew I could do that 
for a fact well I'd probably be working on something like this full time and 
planning on being wealthy in the not too distant future.

I am suggesting that I have some ideas that could be coded into a program 
that would in effect be a type of dust/scratch removal workflow. One that 
would be a combination of machine automated dust/scratch identification and 
selection, along with human fine tuning. With the goal being a significant 
reduction in time and effort when compared to using the clone-stamp, healing 
brush, or dust and speckle removal filters. This is not a tool targeted at 
an image with a handful of dust specks, I'm talking about images that take 
hours to clean by hand.

As far watermarks are concerned, I would not put something like that in this 
program. If a person wants to watermark a modified image they'll have to do 
it on their own.

Derek

===================================================
Tom wrote:

Message: 15
   Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 19:57:47 -0800
   From: Historic Photo Archive <tom@...>
Subject: Re: scratch removal program


It would be impossible, IMHO, for a computer program to distinguish between
important details and dust specs on glass negatives.  However I would agree
there may be a commercial demand for the program; you could make money by
creating or selling it.  I would hope that there would be a watermark to
disclose whether the image is digitally retouched, so that people would not
be led to believe they were looking at an actual historic image, but instead
at a computer altered image.  An analogy is the colorized b&W movies
produced by Turner, which have this disclamer/warning at the beginning of
each altered film.  It would be even better if all historic images were
available in user-selectable retouched / raw versions so that the historical
value of them would not be destroyed by the retouching for the sake of
"pretty picture on the wall."