LR plugin to remove dust from scanned film ?

[oliver0541]

Many of my LR pictures come from 35 mm film stripes, that have been digitized with a flat bed scanner. During that process sometimes dust on the film stripe resulted in little white or black noise on the picture. Is the a LR plugin, that can remove these artefacts ?

[Per Berntsen]

You can use the spot removal tool, but it was designed primarily for removing sensor dust, and is not suited for removing a large number of dust spots.

It's much better (and easier) to do this in Photoshop with the spot healing brush.

[JohanElzenga]

Depending on the scanner, you may have Digital ICE that is much more effective than any software solution would be. If not, have a look at the 'Dust & Scratches' filter in Photoshop. That was designed to do this.

[GoldingD]

Google on “dust and scratches plug” and at least one will show up. I have nit tried any.

[JP Hess]

My experience is that dust and scratch removal is usually a function of the scanning software or software that is included with the scanner. The spot removal tool that is part of Lightroom is suitable for light spot removal and small scratches but would be extremely tedious to use on badly damaged images.

[Todd Shaner · Accepted solution]

I'm not aware of any LR plugin for "automatically" removing dust spots and scratches, etc. from film scan images. As already suggested by Per Berntsen you can use PS's Spot Healing tool to quickly remove these defects manually. I use a Wacom tablet with a pressure sensitive brush for this kind of work in PS. Since your scan files are probably TIFFs and not raw files there's no down-side to using Edit in PS> Edit Original and do the spot healing destructively. LaserSoft also recently introduced a PS Plugin called SRDx, which is probably worth the price if you have a lot of files to process.

SRDx Photoshop Plugin

I've never used it so check the reviews. You can trial it free for 30days.

[johnrellis]

I use LaserSoft's SRDx in their Silverfast scanning software for 35mm Kodachrome slides on a Nikon scanner. It works so-so for me at best. When I set the parameters to remove most of the dust, it removes other fine detail as well and leaves noticeable edge artifacts. So I set the parameters conservatively, leaving lots of dust in the images. But maybe I never found the right way of setting the parameters.

I use LaserSoft's iSRD on Ektrachrome and other non-Kodachrome slides, and it works very well. It uses the infrared dust channel of the scanner. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well with Kodachrome or black-and-white negatives, due to the physical properties of the films.   (The last version of Nikon's scanner software had a version of Digital ICE that could handle Kodachrome very well, but they stopped supporting the software years ago.)

[Todd Shaner]

johnrellis  wrote

I use LaserSoft's SRDx in their Silverfast scanning software for 35mm Kodachrome slides on a Nikon scanner. It works so-so for me at best. When I set the parameters to remove most of the dust, it removes other fine detail as well and leaves noticeable edge artifacts.

Kodachrome and B&W films have a metallic silver halide grain that "automatic" applications can confuse as dust spots. This can create artifacts and remove image detail unless used with low settings. It may work OK with certain subject types and fail miserably with others. Here's what I use along with a soft brush to remove dust BEFORE scanning. It takes a matter of seconds and removes 99% of the dust.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001TO578Q/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003TFE7XO/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_detailpage_o05_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[TMcT]

There is a Photoshop plug-in that you can use if your scanner software doesn't have that ability. It's made by the same company that makes Digital Ice for scanner software.

It's called SRDx. 

Depending on the photo, it can save a lot of time.

https://www.picture-plugins.com