Dust and Scratch Reduction/Removal

6 replies
599 views
Translate

Photoshop already has a powerful remove tool and it can already automate the removal of people, wires, and other distractions, but why can't it remove dust, dirt, and scratches? I'm primarily work with film and other analog media and dust is the bane of my existence. I would love to have this automated feature added to photoshop.

J

Jovial_navigatoreeda

Participant

Not a Photoshop answer, but since you mention thousands of images and IR being slow with artifacts: there are standalone tools that do this after the scan. SilverFast's SRDx is one (per image, fairly hands-on). Another is DustMagic, which my co-founder and I built for exactly this volume problem. Point it at a folder of colour neg/slide scans and it cleans the lot (about 100 images in 3 min), then you check the masks before they go into Photoshop. Not for silver B&W. Search the name if useful.

Translate

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

How fast are those plugins? Topaz Photo can do it, but it takes a good couple of seconds to open its UI and more time to do its job. I’d hate to have to use it on a big folder full of images. I tend to use Generative AI most of the time now. It’s reasonably fast, and it does a cracking job, but it can change things too much for a lot of users — which is fair enough.

Translate

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

I only have a rudimentary understanding of the process, I believe that Adobe or other developers would need many thousands of example image pairs (original + corrected) in order to train a machine learning algorithm to do this.

Translate

V

VulGerrityAuthor

Participating Frequently

Oh, I'm very well aware. IR dust reduction takes too much time for the quality of the results you get. There's artifacts and it doesn't get everything. AI dust/dirt/sratch removal seems like the perfect use case for AI. I understand this is somewhat niche, but I can't be the only person who needs this. I've very intimate with the manual methods of dust reduction, the problem is, I may be processing thousands of images at any given time. I can't reasonably hand dust thousands of photos. Even if I charged hourly for it, I don't think I'd want to do it.

Translate

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

Forgot to mention, you can try making a selection of the dust/scratches and then trying either content aware fill or generative fill without using a prompt.

P.S. Some film scanners have an I.R. option to help isolate and remove surface defects.

https://www.hamrick.com/blog/digital-ice.html

https://www.silverfast.com/about-silverfast-why-scanning-basics-of-scanning/why-silverfast/silverfast-feature-highlights/isrd-dust-scratches-removal-eliminate-defects-with-infrared-channel/

Translate

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

The remove tool wasn't trained on such a data set. Before digital cameras, this would have been a big thing, however, today the market has shrunk.

Before the generative AI features, Adobe created AI Neural Filters, where the Photo Restoration filter did offer such a feature. Your results may vary and these filters are very slow.

The legacy Dust & Scratches filter (no AI) is best used with smaller feathered selections, not applied globally.

Translate

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.