Dusting

Since about 2003 (I think), I've been shooting almost exclusively digital.  As much as I love the process of developing and printing with film photography, I simply don't have the resources for film photography these days.  Even beyond the cost of film, I don't have access to a darkroom, and who wants to take their precious photographs to the 1 Hour Photo booth?  Half the fun of shooting film is developing the film and enlarging!  So, my images generally go straight from camera to laptop these days. 

I did, however, pull a crazy all-night scanning session sometime during my transition from film to digital in order to digitize my favorite prints.  Well, my favorite prints of the ones I happened to be able to locate when I was struck with the scanning insanity (or, if you prefer, scansanity).  Anyway, it turns out that when you're sleep deprived and on a mission, you don't take really important steps like, say, cleaning the scanner.  So, as you can see below, I ended up with a big line down some of my photos, in addition to a lot of dust.  Bleh. 

So, time for some editing, I guess.  Now, the dust is a pain.  I did the editing on this between Lightroom and GIMP.  The dust was time-consuming, but easy enough.  Lightroom has a healing tool which allows you to adjust your selection tool size and select the area you want to "heal".  Lightroom then picks nearby pixels to clone over the spot in need of healing.  It's not always perfect--sometimes it does a really bad job of picking the best pixels to copy.  However, you can easily adjust the area it selects to copy from by dragging the selection circle to another area of your choosing.  The giant, ugly line, however, was not so easy.  Now, maybe there is a very simple way to get rid of a nasty streak in your photo that I'm just not aware of, but that pesky line took well over an hour zoomed in about 1500% with the clone tool...and a lot of CTRL + Z action (for those of you who don't know what that is, it's the shortcut to undo--very handy when you clone something, hate what you've done, and want to delete it...repeatedly).  As you can see below, I managed to get rid of the line and the dust--it's not perfect, but I'm pretty pleased (yes, I also cropped a bit while I was cleaning the photo up anyway).  Lesson learned, though!  Save yourself hours by cleaning the scanner first!