The Dust and Scratches Trick

The Dust and Scratches Trick

This is an incredibly powerful trick for reducing dust and artifacts quickly, with minimal effort. It works on most images, especially those that have some sort of background grain – in other words, most film-based images.  When retouching, I usually use this technique first and see how far it gets me. Then I resort to the traditional tools (healing, clone, patch, etc.) to pick up the pieces. This technique requires a little patience and exactitude to work correctly, but it’s well worth it!

1.     Unlock background Layer, by double clicking it and turning it into a regular layer

1.     Open History Options: Check ON “Allow Non-Linear History” (located in this menu)

2.     Create New Snapshot and label “dirty”

3.     Go to Filter>Noise>Dust and Scratches

4.     Adjust Radius and Threshold as appropriate (careful!)

a)    Magnify your view so you can see the scratches as well as the grain of the film.

b)    Radius should be just enough to make MOST of the scratches disappear (usually between 2 and 6). Have threshold on lowest setting while you determine this.

c)    Then gradually move the threshold slider over until the grain of the film begins to come back, but not so far that “crunchies” appear. This shouldn’t be much more than your radius setting. Click a few times in the little preview window. If you have it right, the only change should be the absence of dust.

5.     Click okay, and then (IMMEDIATELY, Pronto, RIGHT away!) make a new snapshot. Label this “clean”

6.     Target the “dirty” snapshot, so that it is highlighted (blue, in this picture)

7.     Then click in the little box to the far left of the clean snapshot. The history brush icon should appear there. This basically means that you are painting with “clean” onto the “dirty”

8.     Choose a nice, fat, soft brush, for your history brush and start painting over the dust marks.

For light scratches, paint with brush mode: Darken

For dark splotches, paint with brush mode: Lighten

9.     Retouch at 100% magnification

10.   Hint: make sure your healing brush is set to 100% opacity, and be sure you’ve targeted/sourced the correct snapshots.

This technique won’t fix everything...but it will get you far along. If you try to make it do TOO MUCH by setting your levels too high, your image quality will begin to suffer. Also be careful about where you “paint-out” the scratches. Sometimes you will obliterate parts of the image you may want to keep (delicate highlights, for example.)