Sorry Erik, don?t want to hijack your thread, but I felt I had to comment on Welles post.
Welles said:
About all that cloning. Polaroid makes an excellent Dust and Scratch Removal Utility (plugin with a fancy name). It's free (worth every penny and then some) and unbelievably effective.
I experimented with it Welles, but it's only effective in some areas, it's not the perfect solution however.
I've used an image that has several scratches and dust (see attachment in 2nd post)
The Polaroid's filter removed the dust and scratches, but left behind lots of white spots, spots that you can't get rid of with any of its settings, so I just ended up with a new problem.
I then used a different approach. I used Alien Skin Image Doctor's ?scratch remover? (
http://www.alienskin.com/idoc/idoc_filters.html ) to remove the most important scratches. The downside of this filter is that it can only be used with single scratches, but it does this in a very convincing way! (you have to see it to believe it).
Luckily enough you can use CTRL+F to redo the filter with its previous settings as explained in their manual, to attack all the other scratches. It took me about 2 or 3 min with the lasso tool. Then I copied that layer and used the Polaroid filter to remove the smaller dust particles and scratches and moved down the opacity of this layer to about 75%.
Only then did I see a result that impressed me. It can be even better if I had taken the time to fine tune Image Doctor's settings.
Maybe he Polaroid filter works better with other images, I don?t know, I couldn?t find any to experiment with.
Welles, thanks for mentioning this filter, because this works great with Image Doctor!
