Hi Kent,

As I said in a previous message, the "reticulation" is actually just a good representation of the pebbled surface of the original "cardboard" prints.

I applied Neat Image 3.0 Pro+ to your image by selecting several samples of the paper texture. Nothing beyond the Neat Image processing was done. As you can see from the image in the link below, Neat Image completely removed the pebble texture of the paper and left the rest of the image untouched.

<http://www.pbase.com/image/23780941>

Unfortunately some parts of the rest of the image that were untouched were flaws from some bits of dirt and fibers and possible nicks in the print surface or trannie surfaces. Apparently the original pebbled print may have had some dirt on it. I suppose it is possible that some additional fibers and dust appeared on the scanned transparencies. Apparently both the original pebble-surfaced prints and the transparencies of the photographs of those prints provided surfaces that were vulnerable to environmental dust, fibers, and other contamination.

Before doing a scan you should blow off the print or trannie with canned air and/or use a special antistatic brush to remove any foreign material from the surface. You probably have no control over cleaning the original pebbled prints because they were done long ago, but you can clean the trannies with canned air and/or an antistatic brush before scanning them.

Ideally the original photos and subsequent scanning of their transparencies would be done in clean room conditions, but that isn't always possible, so large foreign particles and fibers have to be manually removed in Photoshop. The Rubberstamp (Clone Stamp) tool has long been used to deal with these individual image flaws. The new Healing Brush tool might be a faster way to fix these individual flaws.

If you think any of this dirt was on the surfaces of the transparencies that you scanned, in the future you can save yourself some work in Photoshop by cleaning them thoroughly before scanning them. In my experience, something always gets through and you still need to do a little manual retouching in Photoshop. But hopefully you can keep that to a minimum.

In my own mind, Neat Image 3.0 Pro+ successfully dealt with the pebbled texture of the original photo prints while leaving the rest of the image intact, and I definitely would use it on this project. An alternate approach will be more work and/or reduce image quality. Neat Image can't magically solve all of the problems. But without Neat Image, those pebbled print surfaces are a major problem for you. It is ironic but impressive that Neat Image removed the pebbled texture while leaving little fibers of lint in sharp detail.

-- Burton --

John_Fagerberg

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