The decrease in sharpness isn’t overwhelming, but I am of the opinion that any loss of sharpness is unacceptable. This eliminates the visible dust, but you lose overall sharpness. All of the applications I tried in the past remove dust specs by applying a soft blur to the image. I’ve used other dust removal software, including the despeckle filter in Adobe Photoshop. I wasn’t expecting much from Polaroid’s offering. I doing so, I came across Polaroid’s software. Retouching all those dust mites was out of the question, so I started to cast around for some sort of chemical cleaner. Now there are no red marks around the lettering, so the cleaning process will ignore this section of the image. Notice how the cleaning process has removed some of the lettering on this race car (left.)Īfter reverting the image, I use the select tool to make a loose selection around the effected letters. Of course there will be times the software thinks a crucial part of the image is dust or dirt. What was a big deal was the hundreds of dust specs sprinkled over the final scans. So I was able to insert the 126 strips into the Minolta’s 35mm film carrier.īecause the carrier is not intended for the 126 format, I lost about 1/8″ at the top of each frame. The Minolta Dimage III isn’t designed to scan 126 negatives, but 126 and 35mm negs are exactly the same height. Besides being over 40 years old, it appears the original drug store processing lab wasn’t very concerned with cleanliness. I was scanning in a number of old 126 negatives taken when I was in my early teens. I first discovered Polaroid Dust and Scratch Removal Software a few years ago. I also use it with my Microtek flat bed scanner. But I use Polaroid software with my Minolta Dimage Scan Dual III film scanner. I’m not sure if they are still producing this equipment, as according to the Polaroid website, most of the scanning equipment is no longer in production.įortunately, much of the software is still available online. In the past, Polaroid manufactured a number of film and flat-bed scanners. ![]() Tweaking the settings might eliminate even more marks.Įnter Polaroid’s Dust and Scratches Removal software. ![]() There is still work to be done, but more than 80% of the spots are gone. Right image shows the same area after cleaning with the Polaroid Dust and Scratch Removal software. Image on the left shows a portion the image as it came from the scanner.Īs you can see it would take hours to spot all the dust marks. ![]() These systems can be effective, but you don’t usually have much control over a hardware based dust removal system. Scanner manufacturers usually incorporate some form of dust removal in their scanners. You can clone out the dust marks with a program like Photoshop, but if the dust spots are numerous, retouching becomes extremely time consuming. Even tiny particles of dust will be magnified when the resulting scan is enlarged to a usable size. One of the biggest problems, particularity with older negatives, is dirt and scratches. Negative scanning, however can be quite labor intensive. Professional scanning tends to be expensive, so if you have more than a handful of images, a film scanner may be you best choice. You can pay a lab to create digital images from your negatives or you scan the negatives yourself. If you want to use some of those older film images in today’s digital world, you basically have two choices. When you clean the image, only the red areas will be effected. Red marks indicate the mask created by the Polaroid software.
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