What’s the best editing order for scanned photos in Photoshop?
Asked 4/5/2013
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2 answers
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When editing scanned photos in Photoshop, what workflow order usually works best for common tasks like cropping, tonal/color correction, dust and scratch cleanup, saturation, and sharpening? I’m especially interested in a practical order of operations for scanned images, knowing that not every step is needed on every photo.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
13y ago
2 Answers
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If your scanner has a feature to remove dust and scratches, activate that and use it while scanning. This feature is sometimes called "Digital ICE" (a Kodak brand name), and it uses an extra infrared scan pass to identify and remove dust. This is very effective; much more so than doing it after the fact can be.
If dust and other artifacts remain, I'd suggest doing any automatic filtering as the first step, and any manual touch-up work as the last before unsharp mask.
The other thing I notice is some redundancy in your workflow. Levels is really just a more primitive interface to the Curves tool; you can make that same adjustment there. And brightness and contrast are both even more primitive interfaces to the same thing: there should be no need to make these separate steps. So, I think you can probably save yourself a lot of effort by learning to to use Curves a little more effectively.
Originally by user1943. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1943
13y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
A solid workflow is:
- Get the scan right first: scan at high bit depth if possible, and use the scanner’s built-in dust/scratch removal (often called Digital ICE) if available.
- Do cleanup early: if dust or scratches remain, run automatic cleanup before most edits; leave any manual retouching until near the end.
- Set color/white balance first: this affects all later color and tone adjustments.
- Adjust tone with Curves: Curves can handle most of what Levels and Brightness/Contrast do, so you usually don’t need all three separately.
- Adjust saturation after the main tonal/color corrections.
- Crop once the image is basically corrected.
- Manual spot cleanup if needed.
- Sharpen last: apply Unsharp Mask after all other edits.
Notes:
- Levels, Curves, and Brightness/Contrast overlap; Curves is usually the most flexible tool.
- Dust/scratch cleanup can vary by image, but it should generally happen before sharpening.
- If your scanner can remove dust during scanning, that’s usually more effective than trying to fix it later in Photoshop.
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