Here's a head scratcher. The negetive is completly covered with these faded spots. I've tried various blending modes, etc, to cover these light spots, but to no avail. Anyone run into this or have any ideas as to the best approach?

Thanks everyone,
Bill

What do you get if you scan in color? That would be the first thing I'd try.

Leah,

I have all my high end scans done by an outside source. They batched my last order in everyway. This one, though I asked that it be scanned in RGB, they scanned it in Grayscale. If I take it back and have them scan the b&w film in color, what are you thinking I can do with it?

In some cases, such defects may only reside on one color layer (or be lessened on the others).

This allows you to clean up the image a lot easier :)

- Noel

You could try:

Duplicate the layer.
Invert
try different blending modes and opacity.

Christine

Here's my try. I think I may have over softened it, but the spots are mostly gone. I basically did what Xaran had already suggested, duplicated the bg, inverted it and played with the blending mode. But then I also used a different technique to blend the contrast left over by the white spots a little more.

...cedwar

As Noel says, if the defect exists to different degrees on the different color channels (it's probably asking too much in this case to hope that one channel will be unaffected) it can provide a useful starting point at least for identifying and masking the affected areas and potentially for fixing them. Depends on what you get, though -- if there's not much difference between the channels then it may not be so useful.

Would like to see a larger section of this image if possible - on the attached I created a luminosity mask (ctrl-alt-~) then ctrl J to copy to a new layer.
inverted this layer and changed mode to darken, adjusted the opacity til it looked ok.

Then smudged areas to blend in more.

Christine

Thanks to everyone who’s shared their ideas. I took the negative back to the lab, and after a heated discussion, he decided to humor me and rescan it. He didn’t want to do it because he insisted that because it was a b&w negative, the channels would all be the same. He was right, so using the channel mixer won’t help. I’ve already tried the different blending techniques you folks shared, but I found that I ended up doing so much rework, that it would be just as easy to clone the spots in. But thanks again for sharing them with me. Christine, how big of an example can I post?

It's very unusual for all the channels to be exactly the same -- normally you get subtle differences between them. But that's one possibility out, anyway.

I agree with Leah. There really should be some differences between the channels. Something doesn't sound right. Perhaps the operator misunderstood your instructions? He may have scanned the image in b&w, then converted it to color (won't give the same results).
I'm also suprised by the attitude of the Lab.

I'm surprised at the attitude of the lab also. There shouldn't be any misunderstanding as to what I wanted because he volunteered to convert the first scan to RGB. I told him that I could do that myself and that it wasn’t going to help me. I specifically told him to rescan it, but whether he did or not, I don’t know. I’m taking it to a different lab next week. I’ll let you all know how it turns out. Do want to add that the channels weren’t exactly the same. The green channel was a tiny bit darker overall, but not dark enough to make any difference.

Bill

Try converting the image (if it was indeed scanned in full color) to CMYK. You might be able to see some marked differences in that mode.

Hi everybody!

Bill,

... how big of an example can I post?

You can find an excellent tip/tutorial on this topic here (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4398)

:wavey:

Here's a larger example of my problem.