Here is a small section of a scanned colour photo, the original is about 20 to 25 years old. There is a lot of dust/ scratches on the photo and all these little red spots on the photo. I'm not 100% certain but I think it is the photo starting to degrade in some way.

Using Elements 4 any suggestions for removing these red spots across the whole image? healing/cloning them one by one seems too painful a task to attempt. or suggestions on what programs would be better suited to the task, and why?

thanks

Hi and welcome to RetouchPro.

I made a quick attempt at your photo. A slight Dust and Scratches filter helped reduce most of the spots. Then I used the Healing Brush tool to touch up the rest.

MaryLynn

Not sure if Elements 4 has channels, so following may not work.

First applied Polaroid D&S filter to image to get rid of white dust.

Opened red channel, and applied Polaroid D&S filter to it. (Set to remove white dust).

Have not attempted to remove any other of the pictures defects.

Nice Gary! That looks great. Too often I overlook working directly on the channels with filter like D&S until late in the game.

- Kurt

The red channel seems to be the worst. Another way to remove spots is to copy the layer and use a darken blending mode. Then use the move tool and in this case click the right or left arrow a couple of times to move that layer sideways. Work still needs to be done but it is improved.

Before we get too much further into using channels for this particular problem, Elements 4 does not have channels.

We can, however, do a "Hue/saturation" adjustment layer and work on the reds only.

The darken blending layer sounds interesting.

Thanks MaryLynn,

Feared it may be the case. It's a long time since I've used Elements, and couldn't remember (I've still got the programme, but uninstalled it years ago. Haven't looked at it since getting PS).

Sorry Pturner, will try to find another method.

Using Elements 4, I tried Phil's suggestion and here is the result. Very easy to do without using any filters!

Duplicated background
Did slight Shadows/highlight correction (Image was dark on my monitor)
Duplicated layer, clicked on Move tool. The bounding box appears, pull the right side handle to the right slightly. The arrows don't move the layer in PSE.
Small amount of healing

Thanks, Phil, for the suggestion. I'll have to remember that correction.

MaryLynn

Looking at these suggestions I'll start working on this photo and see how it turns out.