Dust and Scratch Reduction/Removal

[VulGerrity]

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.

[Stephen Marsh]

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.

[Stephen Marsh]

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/silverfas...

[VulGerrity]

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.

[Stephen Marsh]

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.