Re: How Deep Do You Dustbust 2021
I know, I am an idiot. But I do dust removal at 200 %. I do it from the top to the bottom and from left to right side. I have a scale od 1 cm painted on the bottom of my monitor and slide the neg./scan. A 4x5 capture take about 4 hours, but it is very effective.
Re: How Deep Do You Dustbust 2021
Perhaps some want an AI Program that could seek and destroy dust
Re: How Deep Do You Dustbust 2021
My scans from 4x5 are 40x50 inch at 300 dpi, file size 1Gb. For an 8x10 that would translate into 80x100 inch and 4Gb, so it is apples to apples...
Cleanup in PS at a 100% view with a combination of healing brush or clone brush takes about 20-30 mins depending on the image content. And I remove every spec that I see. I don't have many to begin with because most of it is taken care of before scanning...
Before each scanning session my work table surface is cleaned up with a wet sponge, then dry lint free cloth and then covered by a layer of lint free paper (that I save and reuse)
In case of a flat-bed scanner the base glass goes on top of that layer of paper for mounting...I also put my just scanned films onto that layer of paper to dry.
- Cleanup the drum or base glass
- Attach a sheet of mylar along one edge keeping a sheet of overlay paper underneath the mylar
- Holding by free opposite end, lift up both mylar and overlay from the drum or glass
- Blow off dust from the drum or glass surface underneath the mylar
My film is lab processed and comes in sleeves.
Each sheet :
- take it from sleeve
- while holding it between 2 fingers and bending slightly outwards, blow off dust from both surfaces using canned gas (wholesales prices are not bad and a can lasts me for 30-60 sheets)
- blow off the dust from drum (glass) again
- apply mounting fluid to the drum, glass
- put the film onto the drum, glass ( film surfaces, once taken from the sleeve , never touch anything but drum or base glass)
- remove the overlay paper from the mylar
- blow off dust from the "inner" surface of mylar, directionally from side to side instead of top to bottom as all that stuff will settle on the film down below.
- apply mounting fluid onto the film surface
- roll mylar over and seal
- cleanup the outer mylar surface
- Mount the drum or base glass into the scanner
- Final dust blow off from the surfaces
- Scan
Re: How Deep Do You Dustbust 2021
I'm digitizing several hundred frames of 35mm transparency and color negative film from the early 1990s when I studied with the painter Joan Mitchell in Vétheuil, France. I'm making the digital copies using a system I built from a wall-mounted column, an Arca-Swiss M-two (MF) camera, and a Rodenstock HR Digaron Macro 5.6/105 lens. The digital back is the Phase One IQ3 100MP Trichromatic, so this yields a 2:3 aspect ratio TIFF file (500+ MB) that measures about 7580 x 11,370 pixels. I'm doing the basic editing in Adobe Lightroom, with the help of the Negative Lab Pro plug-in for inverting color negatives. After editing, I export a TIFF to Photoshop, where I typically run LaserSoft's SRDx plug-in on a retouching layer. This Photoshop plug-in has very finely-grained controls for intensity and tile size, and can be set to identify dark defects (in positives), or light defects (in negatives). It also has a pen tool that can be used to isolate the most problematic areas, such as skies. SRDx will often deal with 75% or more of the defects in a smooth area, and I then zoom in to 100% and use the Spot Healing Brush to deal with most of the rest of the small problems. However, I am almost exclusively dealing with defects in the physical film, not dust, because before digitizing/scanning, I clean the film — on a sheet of glass — by rolling across both front and back with a 150mm wide Teknek elastomer hand roller. These are used to clean acrylic for face-mounting, and for cleaning PCB materials, and they are simply amazing: removing virtually every particle down to 0.1 microns, so that I almost never see a dust particle. My understanding is that the static charge on particles below 5 microns is sufficiently great that air (vacuumed or blown) can't dislodge them, and you have to use a charge that is larger than the one on the particle to lift it away. DryTac also sells the SDI DRS roller, which is similar, and there are now cheap copies on eBay. I have not tested the cheap Chinese copies on film.
Re: How Deep Do You Dustbust 2021
I thought that this was going to be a conversation concerning cleaning film holders, camera interiors, and limiting the dust in the darkroom on drying negatives. Ah well.
My high end scanning days were over two decades ago. But I found avoiding dust to be a very good use of time.