LaserSoft Imaging

Dear forum members,
Is anyone familiar with a good scratch and dust removal software? I am impressed with what ICE can do but it is a hardware-software implementation and not available for my Kodak Professional Film Scanner.
Working with Photoshop will take me a long time since I am talking about hundreds of images.
Regards and Happy New Year,
Persio.

Persio,

I'm not sure if you know this, but the way that most of those scratch and dust removal techniques work is by using an infrared light to scan over the film, which picks up the dust and scratches, enabling the software to eliminate them. You have to have the hardware to match the software.

Silverfast is rumoured to be working on some sort of ROC/GEM technology of it's own, but it may be months away if it's even coming.

In the meantime, I'd suggest going a little more low-tech. I found this product called Film Guard while working as a movie theatre projectionist. It's a film cleaner, restorer, and preserver made for all formulations of commercial movie prints. It does a killer job at that, but I also tried some for film scanning at home.

It works by SAFELY cleaning off the dust, and since it's a liquid, it has the added bonus of filling in scratches when you scan. Of course you have to wet the prints before scanning them each time to get this benefit, but it works great. Theatres have trusted their $50,000-70,000 prints to this stuff for years, so let me assure you that it won't damage your film.

Also, you can try cleaning with compressed air, and there may be other film cleaning products available at your local photo shop, but I can vouch for this stuff, although it's fairly expensive.

http://www.film-tech.com/

Also, you can post your question here at another great forum:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/

Dust and Scratch Removal

We are working on a very powerful software-based Dust & Scratch Removal. This is a complex undertaking and will be in the next major upgrade of SilverFast.

We expect this upgrade (which will come at a reasonable price) to be there around Hannover CEBIT time this year.

<b> FYI </b>

For those of you who (like me) don't know when the Hannover CEBIT is, it's:

Wednesday, 13th March to Wednesday, 20th March 2002

So not too long to wait for this next, exciting update!

-Ian A.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ianders1 on 2002-02-12 23:43 ]</font>

Dusta La Vista (good software awful name) sold with Dai Nippon (Screen) scanners, you may be able to buy it separately, although it's probably quite pricey. It basicaly reads through your scanned image marking possible imperfections, which you can then edit if neccessary, you then click ok and it's done! It's not perfect by any means, and as I said it's v.expensive but I scan about 200 trans to 30mb files a day and I would be lost without it. Think it might only be available for Mac though.

Well, CEBIT is here, I wonder if the Silverfast Team got this new feature/version finished in time. I'll be checking the homepage for any news - I see they've put up something about being at CEBIT for now. Hopefully we'll hear some news later this week!

-Ian A.

Did this feature ever get done?

--Caleb

Try the SRD function.

Frank