Removing Red/Green/Blue Lines caused by scanner

[dcbarry]

Greetings all:

THis is my first post so be gentle!

I am currently evaluating a new sheet feed style scanner from Kodak. In general it works well, but unfortunately, it does ocassionally cause a problem where a piece of dust will cause a vertical line of red/green or blue to appear, as the photo goes past the scanning area, and remain until the problem is caught. Unfortunately, it can be hard to catch the error in real time.

I've attached two sample photos to show what I mean by this -- note the semi-solid blue line in the middle of the pic.


Disregarding any other aberrartions, I'm trying to get a suggestion on how to remove this particular problem from a large group of photos without a lot of manual work (i.e. in batch) I'm willing to work with any tool, but I'm trying to avoid large amounts of individual processing -- again, something that could be done in a batch method across a group.

Obviously, a clean scan in the first case is going to be best -- but in the case something slips through , it would useful to have a way to fx this.

(Incidentally, the orignal scans are 600 dpi TIFF, I had to heavily downsample and crop to upload the example)

Thanks so much to all for any advice.

[Frank Lopes]

I have a couple of ideas how to do it in batch mode, but first a couple of questions?

Is the line always in the same spot?
Or are there several lines that sometimes appear and sometimes they don't?
Are these very fine lines, one or two pixels wide? Or are they much thicker than that?

Originally Posted by dcbarry

Greetings all:

THis is my first post so be gentle!
...
Thanks so much to all for any advice.

[dcbarry]

Thanks Frank:

They will end up in the same physical spot on the scanner, and basically the same spot across the prints, allowing for a slight variation caused by the scanners auto-detect / auto-crop functions.

[dcbarry]

Oh, and they are 2 or three pixels at most causing the issue, with two neighbor pixels picking up some distortion.

[dcbarry]

Oh, and they are 2 or three pixels at most causing the issue, with two neighbor pixels picking up some distortion.

[Frank Lopes]

I was hoping for different answers :-)

Assuming it was just one line, 1 or 2 pixels wide and assuming it was exactly in the same spot, I would try something like this:

• Scan one image
• Import in Photoshop ( for example but it could be any other tool that supports masks, layers and scripting)
• I would create a mask of a section of the photo up to but not including the line
• I would add another image in a new layer
• Select the new layer and load the mask
• Move the section towards the line just enough to cover the line
• Create another layer, add another image and repeat, and so on etc

The hope was since you are scanning at a fairly hight resolution, moving a section of the image one or 2 pixels to cover the line, would not make a difference.

This process can easily be scripted which would solve your batch request.

In your case, however, since the lines are never exactly in the same spot due to the auto scanner, I'm not sure it would work.

Originally Posted by dcbarry

Oh, and they are 2 or three pixels at most causing the issue, with two neighbor pixels picking up some distortion.

[Jerryb]

hi,
you already gotten some good answers....

i'll address the issue of the lines itself... very likely you got a couple specks of dust either on the reflector or on the bulb....or rarely the ccd!!!! this happen often enough... so you may want to go in and clean that up... maybe just a good blowing of the componets or maybe need to wipe down the components... if you don't do this it always going to be a problem causing you a lot of extra needless work...!! especially if you do a lot of scanning..

there another possiblity that there somthing wrong with the ccd element but... in your post there nothing to indicate that..

Originally Posted by dcbarry

Greetings all:

THis is my first post so be gentle!

I am currently evaluating a new sheet feed style scanner from Kodak. In general it works well, but unfortunately, it does ocassionally cause a problem where a piece of dust will cause a vertical line of red/green or blue to appear, as the photo goes past the scanning area, and remain until the problem is caught. Unfortunately, it can be hard to catch the error in real time.

I've attached two sample photos to show what I mean by this -- note the semi-solid blue line in the middle of the pic.


Disregarding any other aberrartions, I'm trying to get a suggestion on how to remove this particular problem from a large group of photos without a lot of manual work (i.e. in batch) I'm willing to work with any tool, but I'm trying to avoid large amounts of individual processing -- again, something that could be done in a batch method across a group.

Obviously, a clean scan in the first case is going to be best -- but in the case something slips through , it would useful to have a way to fx this.

(Incidentally, the orignal scans are 600 dpi TIFF, I had to heavily downsample and crop to upload the example)

Thanks so much to all for any advice.

[dcbarry]

Well, unfortunately, I think it's just the nature of this scanner (it's a Kodak i1220). This is the scanner which is the basis of the s1220, aka, the "shoebox" photo scanning system Kodak wants to see in every mini photo shop. I think I see why is hasnt caught on.

Since it is sheet feeding 50 pics at a time, it is hard to keep up with the dust. Unfortunately, by the time the pic shows up with a dust line, you have to stop, go back about 10 pics, clean up and go forward again.

When I talked to a senior Kodak rep who I have good reason to believe is truly in a postion to know what he is talking about, he indicated they are working on a firmware fix to help address/minimize the issue, but it wont be out for at least another 3-4 months.

The idea here isn't to get museum quality, but right now, just seems like too much work.

[FotoFixer]

I had an Easy Photo Reader that had the same sort of problem. Small, it read one photo at a time. It came with software that could take out those lines. My recollection is that it did a good job of it, probably borrowing neighboring pixels. So, there is software out there that can handle it.

[Verywierd]

This might work. I tried it on your sample image and the results were reasonable, although if a particular picture has a very complicated colour pattern then it won't.

Anyway, set up an action in Phototshop to do the following:

1. Select the healing brush tool.
2. Set tool to colour mode and a soft edged brush with the width a few pixels wider than the line to allow for variations in position.
3. Take a sample from just beside the line at the top of the picture.
4. Hold shift (in Windows) and paint down along the line.

Run the action in a batch.

In colour mode, the healing brush will try to blend the selected colours over and around the line but not disturb any textures. At worst, you will get a less obvious line with colours fairly close to the surrounding area.

You will have to set up the action for every new batch of photos as the line will be in a different place.

The attached is your photo after a single stroke of the healing brush.