I appreciate very much you responding and clarifying to see if somebody else does know.

Actually the Noise Filter has five selections to choose from.

I'm most interested in the Dust & Scratches tool. And, very surprised not to find a lot of 'discussion' about it, in fact almost none.

This whole Dust & Scratches Removal thing has got me scratching my butt trying to figure out if any of it by any software is NOT mostly hype.

(long reply follows)

"Retouching" tools like Dust & Scratches Removal seem to be useable only on a 1-by-1 file basis, with lots of 'manual' tweeking required, not as an Auto function to batches of lots of files at the same time.

Which in hindsight from experiences and what I've learned from those, makes sense, but, does not help me.

I have now concluded that 'retouching' some things like Dust & Scratches can only be done on a 1-file-at-a-time basis and takes quite a bit of 'manual' tweeking effort. And works IF one is capable of understanding how to do it. Otherwise, it - meaning me - only seems to make things worse instead of better.

My journey started last year when I got a German Braun Slide Scanner that included ICE, as well as Noise Reduction, which, like the included GEM and ROC only seemed to make things worse instead of better, especially worse when applying the same settings to every slide being scanned.

I have to process 100s or 1,000s of slides, and soon old photos too, at a price that most people can or are willing to pay, which is very low because of the numbers of slides and photos involved, so it's imperative for me to have Auto Tools to apply to batches of files, instead of spending a lot of time 'manually' tweeking each and every file one at a time.

With the scanner, the ICE and other tools can only be used during the actual scanning of each slide, not after scanning on the resulting file. And those 'tools' invariably remove too much, details of faces and other stuff one wants to preserve, and fuzzy the focus.

The settings that work on the very first slide or photo do not work for any other. So, I had to turn off those tools altogether.

There was a software suite recommended for the scanner for after-scanning work, which was a European version of Photoshop, costing about as much as PS, but from the Trial version I couldn't see any benefit to getting it.

I tried various Retouching programs for much less money, many not worth even trying, and again, even for those that did do what I needed to any degree, ran in to the same thing. Way too much time required for 'manually' tweeking each and every file 1 at a time, and never getting a good result because I'm no good at doing that.

THEN I recently got a Kodak Photo Scanner that does photos like the German scanner does slides, only, it does photos a LOT faster. It will scan up to 20 pre-loaded standard thickness photos of various sizes and orientations - in about 25 seconds.

But again, the problem with Dust & Scratches.

There's a program suite for after-scanning 'retouching' available for the Kodak Photo Scanner - but they want $ 700 for that, and it's pretty much a clone of Photoshop.

SO,

when I saw the comparison list between PS CS3 and the Extended version saying the Extended has a better Noise Filter,

It got me wondering..........

stevehartwell

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