[Stephen A]

Hey guys & gals,

I need some help, I'm in a bit of a jam... I work in a photo print shop, and camera sales shop, so this is a problem I run into quite often - and one I'd love to be able to fix...

A lot (all I've seen so far) matte finish photos obtain this finish via a small texture across the surface of the photo. When they're scanned in - you get a repetative noise across the entire photo.

You would think it would be as easy as selecting the noise with an antialiased magic wand selection, and overlaying it as an inverted darkened layer in Photoshop - it's not, and I have no clue why.

If you guys could tell me if there's a sure-fire way to fix this problem I would really appreciate it... and even if you can't tell me a sure-fire I'd still appreciate the best ways you know of to fix it. Thanks!

Here's an example of the problem...

[0lBaldy]

I used the FFT action found here:

http://www.skeller.ch/ps/fft_action.php

and discussed thoroughly here:

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/archive/t-10911.html

To continue with the cleanup just continue using whatever means you are comfortable with to..: get rid of noise, do levels/curves adjustment, sharpen etc.

[Swampy]

Also, if you are doing the scanning, turn on the "descreen" function in your scan software. Most scan programs have this feature.

[Stephen A]

Awww man, that was exactly what I needed.

Took me a few tries to get the action all figured out, but now that I've done it... I think I could probably make an action to select all the highlighted spots and drop a black spot on them...

I'll get back to you guys if I get a decent action made up to select the spots - thanks guys.