So avid readers (hi Meg!) will recall that I’ve been mucking with the ol’ Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED scanning negatives. I’ve finished the near-600 color shots from our wedding, and now I’m working on the black and whites. They were taken using Kodak T-MAX 100, aka TMX 5052. Why does this matter? ‘cuz the Digital ICE that comes with the scanner won’t remove the dust and scratches, so after scanning the negatives look pretty crappy.

I wonder how the original prints came out so nice, given the condition of some of the negatives… but I digress.

I found a good link from Graf Photography: http://www.grafphoto.com/dust.htm, that helped out a ton. What I’ve ended up doing is using the Polaroid Dust & Scratch Remover as a plug-in to Photoshop, then manually touched up scratches and large dust points, mostly using the Photoshop CS Dust & Scratches filter. I’ve also made great use of the File Browser window, Actions (i.e. Macros), and the Automate feature of the File Browser window. It’s almost like a command line, just slower with more mouse clicks.

I’ll post up some of the results when done… some are still iffy (like those with lots of medium-sized scratches… drat), but a lot are turning out reasonably well. Yay!