How to fix long scratch on negative?

RB
Posted By
Ronald Bruck
May 14, 2004
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846
Replies
2
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Closed
In some rolls of color negatives I have a horizontal streak which crosses the entire width of the film. The film transport mechanism has clearly scratched the roll (or it’s a scanner malfunction, but that’s unlikely on EVERY negative in a roll).

Typically this is three or four pixels high, at 4800 dpi. On a print this won’t be visible, but on-screen it’s very annoying. What’s the best way to get rid of it?

What I’ve been doing is making a rectangular selection across the width of the picture, shifting it up six or eight pixels, copying, shifting back down, and pasting (then merging the layers). This mitigates the appearance, but if anybody ever looks at my pictures they’ll know I faked them 🙂 Fortunately the scratch is high in the film, and doesn’t usually cross any human faces (or it would be a REAL problem). What’s the best way to handle this?

The strip is strongly cyan (in the positive print); there doesn’t seem to be any actual pixel information there. So it occurred to me I might set a gradient from one rectangle (slightly above) to another rectangle (slightly below), effectively interpolating. Is there some way to do this in Photoshop? (I’ve looked at the Gradient command, but it doesn’t seem to do this.

–Ron Bruck
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MR
Mike Russell
May 14, 2004
Ronald Bruck wrote:
In some rolls of color negatives I have a horizontal streak which crosses the entire width of the film. The film transport mechanism has clearly scratched the roll (or it’s a scanner malfunction, but that’s unlikely on EVERY negative in a roll).

Typically this is three or four pixels high, at 4800 dpi. On a print this won’t be visible, but on-screen it’s very annoying. What’s the best way to get rid of it?

What I’ve been doing is making a rectangular selection across the width of the picture, shifting it up six or eight pixels, copying, shifting back down, and pasting (then merging the layers). This mitigates the appearance, but if anybody ever looks at my pictures they’ll know I faked them 🙂 Fortunately the scratch is high in the film, and doesn’t usually cross any human faces (or it would be a REAL problem). What’s the best way to handle this?

The strip is strongly cyan (in the positive print); there doesn’t seem to be any actual pixel information there. So it occurred to me I might set a gradient from one rectangle (slightly above) to another rectangle (slightly below), effectively interpolating. Is there some way to do this in Photoshop? (I’ve looked at the Gradient command, but it doesn’t seem to do this.

You’re doing the right stuff. Another trick for scratches, that I used to use on just about every roll in my film scanning days, is to use the clone tool.

Click where you want the clone to start, release the mouse, and hold down the shift key while clicking on the end point. This lets you do a line of pixels at a time. Split the clone into several line segments, and your gloriour work will be harder to detect.
—

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net
BV
Bart van der Wolf
May 14, 2004
"Ronald Bruck" wrote in message
In some rolls of color negatives I have a horizontal streak which crosses the entire width of the film. The film transport mechanism has clearly scratched the roll (or it’s a scanner malfunction, but that’s unlikely on EVERY negative in a roll).

Make two scans, rotating the image 180 degrees in between. That will tell you if it is in the film or in the scanner.

Typically this is three or four pixels high, at 4800 dpi. On a print this won’t be visible, but on-screen it’s very annoying. What’s the best way to get rid of it?

If it is perfectly horizontal/vertical, then the scanner may cause the artifact and since it is a couple of pixels wide (slightly blurred?), it could be dust. If it is tack sharp, it’s the CCD.

SNIP
The strip is strongly cyan (in the positive print); there doesn’t seem to be any actual pixel information there. So it occurred to me I might set a gradient from one rectangle (slightly above) to another rectangle (slightly below), effectively interpolating. Is there some way to do this in Photoshop? (I’ve looked at the Gradient command, but it doesn’t seem to do this.

You’d have to sample a color above, and another below the defect, switching foreground and background in between. Then make a gradient between fore- and background, in the correct direction perpendicular to the ‘scratch’. You’d want to apply the gradient in a selection of the ‘scratch’. You could even apply a little noise to the selection, similar to the surrounding noise structure. Making an action for it will save you time.

The Patch tool is probably a better solution though.

Bart

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