I have trouble with dust getting into the scanning process of printed photos. I know, I know - work harder on avoiding the dust in the first place. I will, but I will never eliminate it, and I'm getting ready to scan a LOT of photos. The content-aware Spot Healing Brush does a magical job, but it's laborious to click on all the spots one by one. While doing that on a a particularly dusty scan of an old 8x10 aerial photo of a marathon (see small snippet below), I decided to look for something more automatic. Because it was scanned at 1200dpi, the image content had no sharp color changes, making the dust distinctive by sharpness. I tried the Dust & Scratches filter, but even at a setting of only 2 or 3 pixels, I was not happy with the effect on the image content, and a setting of 1px didn't catch enough of the dust.
So my engineering brain started imagining how the various smarts of Photoshop could theoretically be combined to automate it, and I thought I'd ask if something like this is possible. Given a scan at a high resolution like my sample below, so that the dust is much sharper than any content, I imagine a tool doing something like this:
- Select all areas of white (or nearly white - perhaps a threshold like the Magic Wand tool has) that have edges sharper than some threshold (e.g. a luminosity change of at least 50 within 2px).
- Apply the same technology as the Spot Healing Brush (content-aware) to each of those selected areas.
Naturally that wouldn't catch everything - there are occasionally defects that are dark instead of light (dust in the camera instead of the scanner) or particles that are translucent, but the ugliest ones are the bright white ones, and I would happily do additional touches manually if a tool could eliminate the specks like this.
Does anything like this exist in Photoshop, or can I kluge a macro from existing tools? I'm also open to suggestions of third-party tools (PS plugins or standalone tools for Windows) if free or not too expensive.
1 Correct answer
I decided to try to manually do the parts of Stephen's action that I understand, and I might be getting somewhere. Here is what I did, starting from scratch, combining ideas from Stephen and S_Gans:
- I duplicated the background layer twice - once for the layer that will have Dust & Scratches applied with a layer mask, and the second copy as the sandbox to make the selection for the mask.
- On the sandbox layer, I ran Filter -> Other -> High Pass, selecting a radius that only barely showed a hint of t
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@OsakaWebbie thank you very much! I downloaded it, but when I am running it I get an error for Blac&White preset, I will try to figure it our. Again thank you very much! Eugene
Hey @Stephen_A_Marsh
I don't understand what you mean by that. Do you mind writing out step by step directions for that so I can reference on screen? I don't mean to trouble you, I'm a visual learner.
By @IanWhite55
Actions are cross-platform, however, absolute URI paths to resources are not. You need to delete and re-record the step that is causing the error as per this screenshot:
@OsakaWebbie I'm just now seeing this post, I downloaded the action! Thank you so much. However, I am running into the same issue as @Twisted_Mind . I run the action and then I get a notification that says "Could not complete the Black & White command because actions that reference files can only be played on the same platform on which they were recorded." Do you know any way around this?
By @IanWhite55
Perhaps there is some way to edit the action to fix the file paths, but I have no idea. Probably the simplest solution would just be to record the action yourself. I haven't looked at this in years, but as far as I can remember, the Action I made is just the steps I described in this post (which I marked as the "correct answer", even though, of course, others helped with a lot of clues before I got to that point): https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/semi-automatic-healing-of-white-dust-...
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