Last weekend I got a bunch of old vacation photos (from my pre-digital photography days) scanned from negatives. Due to some accidental circumstances we couldn’t get hold of the air compressor needed to clean (blow dust off) the negatives and that has been quite a pain.
The problem is that even small dust particles become fairly large once the scan is complete. While we did try to remove the dust before scanning it wasn’t too successful and so it’s been a lot of hard work fixing the images throughout the week.
In photoshop there is an excellent tool for fixing this kind of image errors, but it takes painfully long time – especially if it’s a details high-resolution image.
If there’s a lesson to be learned it’s definitely don’t scan negatives if you haven’t the tools to clean them before scanning.
