Who can remove the black dots from my vision?

[Eigil Skovgaard]

Or are they white...?
Both actually - in a genious mix forming a halftone image.
After having scanned a unique images from an old newpaper, at 600 dpi, (my scanner has moire-reduction, but no dedicated halftone elimination) I opened the image in Photoshop CS5 and right away faced the problem, that scratches were impossible to repair wihtout interfering with the raster pattern - making the errors even more visible.
I realised that I need to reverse the halftone proces to get smooth graduated continuous tones.
But how? I have not been able to find a convincing method - yet.
No, gaussian blur is not the solution. When the pattern is gone, so is the important contours of the image. Neither is the Dust and Scraches remove tool, nor Smart Blur, nor any of the creative filters.
I am looking for at really smart application or plug-in, that can do this job.. and spare me the strange symptoms.
Who knows the answer?
Br. Eigil

[PicsbyChance]

Hej Eigil,

I have the same problem, infact you reminded me of it. My aunt asked me to enlarge an image of my uncle when he was younger from a newspaper article. When I scanned it I didn't notice those pesky dots but when I got home and pulled it up into photoshop, there they were! I have spend the last 30 minutes trying to find the image so I could try playing with it again. Have you tried noise reduction in the camera raw editor? I wanted to try it before I suggested it so if it was a totally lame idea I just wouldn't suggest anything.

Let me know if you find a way to fix it.

Good luck!

Mike

[Eigil Skovgaard]

Hej! Mike,

Thank you for the inspiration.
My scanner is a printer that is limited to output jpg-files. My raw-converter is CO1 that doesn't do much on jpgs (nor dngs). So I loaded the scanned image into ARC and pulled the luminance slider to the outermost right position. It almost removed the halftone pattern, so I repeated the procedure, until any sign of a grid was gone. Two treatments left me with a fairly usable contrast, but also with at serious amount of scattered blemishes, which will take a lot of retouching to make right. But it is not impossible.

What I imagined was a utility that (after a single button-push) evens out the halftone pattern into a continuous toned image. I have seen some heavy formulas on the Internet, so serious thinking has been done so far, I just need the product into which the result has been implementet. It could be a more advanced scanner, but I had hoped for something more like a plug-in to my PS.

Br. Eigil

[PicsbyChance]

Br. Eigil,

I am happy it worked. Now I will have to find my photo and try it! It would be nice if there was an automatic fix out there, but I haven't seen it if it exists.

Mike

[Eigil Skovgaard]

Hi Mike,
Hope your photo will behave.
To avoid confusion - I meant ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) - I think you have guessed.
(If you have exercised the zone system yourself, or just like what Ansel Adams did, you will enjoy this later perspectival part of the tail: http://www.fotosidan.se/cldoc/webb-t...aren-ansel.htm )
Br. Eigil

[PicsbyChance]

Hej Br. Eigil,

Thank you for the link! I did enjoy it and no, I haven't gotten the zone system down yet. I hope some day I too can determine my exposure by knowing the brightness of the moon relative to the shot I want without a light meter. Amazing!

Mike