Stand alone Dust and scratch removal programs

[felix5616]

I use a creo scanner, super high quality scans but no dust and scratch removal. Is there any stand alone dust and scratch removal software that i can use on scanner images?

[Chris Kern]

I've never found anything that works well.  I'm still laboriously spotting my scans manually.

Several years ago, I was told by an imaging specialist from Adobe that removing or at least significantly reducing surface imperfections was an active area of research for the company.  Since then, Lightroom has acquired a fairly capable facility for removing sensor dust and Photoshop has made modest incremental improvements in dust and scratches removal, but neither application is yet capable of properly cleaning up scans to my satisfaction without manual intervention.  Given Adobe's technical resources, I'm not surprised the various standalone tools I've tried (Topaz, etc.) aren't significantly better.

Theoretically, it should be possible to train a neural network to distinguish surface imperfections from real detail in scanned images. The obstacle, it seems to me, is assembling a proper "training set."  You can't just scrape the Web for unprocessed image scans online.  There are so many variables in scanned images—film or print, color or monochrome, high resolution or low—that you would need an enormous number of samples to account for all the combinations of attributes.  If you could somehow surmount those hurdles and assemble enough images to train the neural network, the staff time required flag the unacceptable results would be enormous.

[digitaldog]

You could try the AI dust removal in Adobe Camera Raw. It is possible to load a non-raw into it FWIW. Either Adobe Camera Raw as a filter or using the Open command.

[degrub]

Can you wet mount on the scanner ?

[Rhossydd]

You could try the AI dust removal in Adobe Camera Raw.

As I understand this function in ACR is designed and tuned for digital sensor dust only. It does that reasonably well, but is useless on film dust. It's been discussed on the Negative Lab Pro user support forum and no one has found the function useful.
Disappointing.

For smaller files Chat GPT can remove some some dust spots on a jpg with the free version, but output size and format is limited. Sending larger Tiffs seems futile as the file returned has no dust spot removed and, worse, it's tonality is wrecked.
I've only tried it on a couple of images and maybe the paid version will do better, but from what I've seen it is unlikely to be useful for a high quality workflow any time soon.

Unfortunately we'll have to keep laboriously working through our film scans manually for now.

[Mark D Segal]

I've tried several applications for this, most prominently perhaps SilverFast SRDx. It's probably the most capable, but fine-tuning it is a time consuming trial and error procedure and at best it will miss some and erase stuff that shouldn't be erased. I think the problem any such application has is the difficulty of distinguishing between film "grain" and dirt. Speaking of colour negatives in particular, the so-called grain is actually dye-clouds which constitute the guts of the image itself, so let an imperfect application erase at your risk and peril. In the final analysis I have settled on two things: (1) use a powerful (electric) blower or vacuum to sweep away whatever will be swept in this manner, and (2) for anything stubborn that remains, cure it in Lightroom with the "Content Aware Remove" tool. It is excellent and one can work through a photo using this quickly with a bit of experience. These suggestions are based on the simple principles that prevention is better than cure, and there is no replacement - yet - for human judgment applied to this task.

[degrub]

using an "anti-dust" brush will help also. Polonium based if i remember correctly. Blowing air across works, but  charges the film as well.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

I use a creo scanner, super high quality scans but no dust and scratch removal. Is there any stand alone dust and scratch removal software that i can use on scanner images?

Hi,

Depends on the image and image size I guess, but you could give Topaz Photo a try.
Updated Dust and Scratch filter V2

This application does much more than just Dust and Scratch removal, but that's a bonus 

Cheers,
Bart