How to avoid these imperfections? (Newbie Alert)

[Aurock]

Hey all. I've recently begun trying to digitize old family photos. I'm going through boxes of pictures and scanning them all in. I have a pretty good epson scanner, and am scanning the photos at 1200dpi, with the scanner's dust removal and color correction options turned on.

Some pictures look bad on the original, but after scanning look much better. The auto color correction does wonders. However, the dust removal doesn't seem to do much.

This picture, for example, has lots of specs on it. The original looks perfect, with no odd specs or damage. Why when I scan it in am I getting these white spots, and what can I do to avoid them?

[mistermonday]

Aurock, welcome to Retouch Pro!
Scanners pick up tiniest specks that the eye can not see without a magnifying device. You should examine the image under a magnifying lense or jewellers loop to see if the specs are actually spots on the paper where the dyes are missing. The other thing to ensure is that fine particles of dust are not on the photo surface. If they are you should wipe them off or blow them away with compressed air.

You may not like the following suggestion, but here goes.
"Auto" anything in scanner s/w can be dangerous because when it guesses incorrectly, it often damages certain attributes of an image and the damage is often not reversible (over sharpening, blurring, contrast increase, etc). My recommendation is to turn off ALL scanner auto corrections - auto color, auto contrast, descreen, dust and scratches, auto levels, sharpening). Take a raw scan at a high resolution and bring it into Photoshop or other editing s/w and use the tools in the editing program to make all the adjustments.

Regards, Murray

[Aurock]

I've been trying to watch to make sure the auto scanned image looks right, and in some cases I've scanned it without the corrections. Here's one example of the auto color correction from the scanner. Do you think it could be done better manually?

[chillin]

Originally Posted by mistermonday

...
You may not like the following suggestion, but here goes.
"Auto" anything in scanner s/w can be dangerous because when it guesses incorrectly, it often damages certain attributes of an image and the damage is often not reversible (over sharpening, blurring, contrast increase, etc). My recommendation is to turn off ALL scanner auto corrections - auto color, auto contrast, descreen, dust and scratches, auto levels, sharpening). Take a raw scan at a high resolution and bring it into Photoshop or other editing s/w and use the tools in the editing program to make all the adjustments.

Regards, Murray

I second that

[Aurock]

Wow... gorgeous work.

This is exactly the kind of correction I need on many of the photo's I'm scanning. I just need to learn how to do it!

[chillin]

I have
1. Split RGB channels
2. Ran Neat Image on blue & green channels left the red channel for sharpness preservation.
3. Lowered the brightness & increased the contrast on the red channel.
4. Adjusted the blue & green channels too
5. Combined the channels & run Color Washer.
6. Knocked out the faces & run iCorrect to equalize the colors
7. Blended them back in.
8. Used scratch remover
9. Run quick clarifier set on 2
…and I think that was it.

[Aurock]

Thanks for the step by step. I'm going to try using that photo as a learning project then, following your directions. I'm completely new to photoshop, so that should help me get the hang of things a bit...

[Aurock]

Originally Posted by chillin

I have
1. Split RGB channels
2. Ran Neat Image on blue & green channels left the red channel for sharpness preservation.

To do this, do you save each channel as a seperate image?

[chillin]

I saved as a new image, increased the color depth, ran the neat image & pasted back to the channel image, flatten it & ready to combine.

[Jerryb]

hi,
you probably already check this out.. but have you cleaned the plate glass lately? I had a problem a few month ago I started getting speck on the scans and the original picture was good and it turned out there was some dust particles on the scanner plate glass...

Originally Posted by Aurock

Hey all. I've recently begun trying to digitize old family photos. I'm going through boxes of pictures and scanning them all in. I have a pretty good epson scanner, and am scanning the photos at 1200dpi, with the scanner's dust removal and color correction options turned on.

Some pictures look bad on the original, but after scanning look much better. The auto color correction does wonders. However, the dust removal doesn't seem to do much.

This picture, for example, has lots of specs on it. The original looks perfect, with no odd specs or damage. Why when I scan it in am I getting these white spots, and what can I do to avoid them?

[Aurock]

Yes, I've cleaned the scanner glass often, as it tends to pick up smudges and gunk as I go thru these photos.

[Aurock]

Originally Posted by chillin

I have
1. Split RGB channels
2. Ran Neat Image on blue & green channels left the red channel for sharpness preservation.
3. Lowered the brightness & increased the contrast on the red channel.
4. Adjusted the blue & green channels too
5. Combined the channels & run Color Washer.
6. Knocked out the faces & run iCorrect to equalize the colors
7. Blended them back in.
8. Used scratch remover
9. Run quick clarifier set on 2
…and I think that was it.

Are there any tutorials or guides that explain how to do thse things? I've gone thru many of the tutorials here, but they all seem to assume a basic knowledge of how to get to the various functions of photoshop.

I'm starting from scratch. I'm good with computers in general, and a pretty quick learner, but Photoshop is (other than the basic tools) different than anything I've worked with before.

Based on your steps above, I got as far as saving the blue and green as seperate images and bringing them into 'Neat Image', but I Neat Image didn't seem like it was doing anything. It said it couldn't find a plain area of the picture, and when I click to the output image screen, it doesn't look significantly different than the input image, if at all.

[chillin]

Did you change the mode or it still is a grayscale image?

[Aurock]

For the blue & Green copies? They are still greyscale.

Edit: It is greyscale, but the image mode shows that it's RGB.

[Aurock]

I just ran it again, and looking closer, it does appear to have cleared up grainy dots over the image, just not as much of the specs and such as I expected it to.