Cleaning Glass Plate Negatives

[BURNFIELD]

Hi,
I have 2 boxes of 4x3 inch glass plate negatives. One box says Barnet Plates, the other Imperial Plates. I believe both are dry methodology. I am using an epson perfection v700 and the plates scan very well. iSRD does not work, I guess because of the silver halide in B&W. I have been trying SRD and it does not seem to work either. There is very obvious black dirt (which has not come off using cleaning fluid) visible on the scans. Selecting black defects and playing with detection and defect size not one of the dirt spots is removed. Using "mark" to see what SRD is picking out there are thousands (!) of small areas marked red but not one of the dirt spots is identified. There is no obvious reason for all these points to be selected. I have even tried scanning as a positive and selecting white defects.

These plates are very old and is their formulation something that prevents SRD working just as silver halide prevents iSRD working? Or am I just doing something wrong?

[LSI_Ketelhohn]

Dear customer,

SRD is software based and has to guess what dots are dust and which not.
In case there are already a lot of dots in the image itself theses are difficult to identify.
Especially if an image is very grainy the function might detect wrong areas.

In such a case the masks in the SRD expert settings can help.
They allow you to limit the correction to certain areas.

Kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

[BURNFIELD]

Hi Arne,
The problem slide has a cloudy sky on one half and a seascape on the bottom half. I had tried a mask over the entire sky but this did not work. As per your suggestion I narrowed the mask down to a very small area with a couple of black dots. As before the black dots are not selected but many small areas are dotted red. When the image is magnified it does appear very grainy. I think this must be confusing the software. I think I will take the view the black dots add character to this old slide.

I must say though that the dust and scratch removal tools do a great job on old colour slides.

[LSI_Ketelhohn]

Dear customer,

Have you tried limiting the defect type to black?
Make sure that it is not set to white, that would not detect black defects.

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kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.