Digital BW, The Print

> 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."
>
> Just a few days ago, I was retouching a 1939 photograph of Mt. Hood, 
> and was
> about to wipe away some specs on a slope near the top, and a 
> researcher from
> the Mazamas happened by, he looked at those and was able to tell me the
> exact date the photograph was taken, he recognized them as the little 
> flags
> on the slope for skiers, and they were in that precise position for 
> only one
> day, which was the tryouts for the 1939 olympics.  These little flags 
> were
> probably a half mile away and were no bigger than a dust spec on the 
> 5x7"
> negative.  There were plenty of scratches on this nitrate film.  The 
> image,
> if you want to see it, is here (although the specs are too small to 
> see):
> http://historicphotoarchive.com/caps5/00468.html
>
> -- 
> Thomas Robinson
> http://www.historicphotoarchive.com
>> Subject: [Digital BW] Digest Number 2904
>>
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 08:13:33 -0800
>> From: Bart Nadeau <bartsf@...>
>> Subject: Re: Digest Number 2903
>>
>> I sure would welcome a Photoshop plug in version. I am scanning a very
>> large collection of old images from 1900 - 1940 on both glass plates
>> and film, sizes ranging from 120 to 8 x10, condition ranging from
>> wonderful to terrible. Such a plug on would sure cut down the
>> retouching.
>>
>> Bart
>> On Mar 1, 2005, at 7:54 AM,
>> DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com wrote:
>>
>>> 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