Can dust be detected automatically when scanning traditional black-and-white silver halide film?
Asked 3/14/2014
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I want to scan traditional black-and-white silver halide film and have the scanner automatically detect and remove dust. Digital ICE and similar infrared-based systems do not work because the silver grains in B&W film interfere with infrared detection much like dust does. Is there any commercially available alternative for automatic dust detection/removal on this type of film?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
12y ago
2 Answers
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Short answer is no for the reason you've stated: silver grains in black and white film block light in the same manner as dust. Color images are made of dye clouds which are translucent and do not block light.
The only defect repair I'm aware of that works on b/w is SilverFast scanning software, which has a feature called SRD (not to be confused with iSRD which does an infrared scan like ICE).
SRD allows you to select areas to be repaired but, as the cited article says, it's time-consuming and not suitable for batch scanning. You're better off cleaning the negatives as best as you can and devoting some time to touching up the scans.
Originally by user26883. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user26883
12y ago
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Generally, no. Infrared-based dust removal systems such as Digital ICE do not work on traditional silver halide black-and-white film because the silver grains block infrared light similarly to dust, so the scanner cannot reliably tell them apart.
A partial commercial alternative is software-based defect repair, such as SilverFast SRD. Unlike infrared cleaning, it works from the image data itself, but it is not truly automatic in the same way and typically requires manual area selection. That makes it slow and not well suited to batch scanning.
In practice, the usual approach is to clean the negatives as thoroughly as possible before scanning, then retouch remaining dust spots afterward in software.
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