Well, today I finally finished the scanning and hopefully the photoshopping of the black and white weddings. Some 500 black and whites… each scanned and photoshopped. I’ve been learning a bit about PhotoShop. Mostly, I start with the Polaroid Dust & Scratches plugin I mentioned below. I used to use the PhotoShop Dust and Noise for the early photos, which is kinda like a self-adjusting color fill. It works well for white dust blots, but horrible on scratches. I then started using the Clone tool (looks like a blotter) and then the Healing tool (looks like a band-aid)… the clone tool is good for big patterns, like skin or clothing. The Healing tool is OK, and sometimes does OK on scratches across big areas (again, clothing and swatches of skin or background). Nothing really helps scratches across detail.

The other thing I’m trying to determine is what caused the scratches I kept seeing on the pics… I wasn’t sure if it was the rollers on the Nikon Scanner or rollers from where they were developed when we had the prints done. I’m thinking it’s from previous developing, as I cleaned the rollers and sometimes see them, sometimes don’t. This also indicates it’s not likely dust on the scanning lens itself, and the parallel streaks just yell roller. Hmmm… frustrating. What I don’t know is if it’s a scratch (meaning film loss) or rubber residue (so cleaning would cure it). It probably doesn’t matter…. if we ever get more pictures done, we’ll let the developer deal with that. I suspect we will shortly… the nice thing about getting all these done is MK and I can now look at them and see if there are any we’d like to see blown up.

Oh, and yes, they’ll be turned into an album shortly.