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Leica M Monochrom

2012-05-17T16:59:38Z

The big news in the land of Leica is the new Leica M Monochrom. Yeah, and the 50 APO-Summicron-M ASPH as well. It’s made me think my impending acquisition of a digital camera.

Let’s get the new 50 out of the way first. Cool lens, monstrously expensive. As long as Leica keeps making the ‘cheaper’ 50s, I think it’s neat that they make a truly exceptional lens like this, no matter what the price. At the same time, the now ‘affordable’ 50 Summilux ASPH is just fine with me. Faster, a bit more character, and I already own it. But if someone gave it to me, I’d probably keep it.

Onto the Leica M Monochrom. Cool camera. I mostly shoot B&W film, so a B&W camera actually appeals to me for some reason. Sure you give up the ability to do color, but you can always pick up a Micro 4/3’s camera for that. Three things interest me about this camera:

High ISO. Since there are no Bayer filters, there’s more light hitting the sensor, meaning the effective ISO goes up. Base ISO is 320 (compared to 160 for the M9) and runs all the way up to 10,000! The M9’s ISO range always bothered me—just a bit too low for a camera that costs $7k. ISO 2500 on the M9 can look a bit rough, so you are mostly stuck at 1250 and below, which is where I am with film. The M-M looks totally usable to me pretty much up to 10,000.
Noise quality. This is related to the higher ISO. Less noise since more light hits the sensor. Also, since the image data doesn’t have to be demosaiced, the noise from other noisier channels doesn’t contaminate good channels. Since there’s one channel. What this ultimately means is that the noise is pretty tight and contained to individual pixels. It’s not blotchy, and I’ve also not noticed any streaks.
No red/cyan edges. I never really heard a definitive answer as to what caused it on the M9, but it sounds like it was something to do with the steep angle of incoming light interacting oddly with the Bayer filters. This camera is monochrome and has no Bayer filters, so my Zeiss ZM 21/4.5 should work just fine!

Notice I didn’t talk about the increased resolution due to the missing Bayer array. That’s nice and all, but the M9’s resolution is enough for me. I’m not complaining though. The files look pretty amazing at 100%. Which I would then mask with grain, but it’s nice to have it if you need it.

What remains to be seen is what the dynamic range of the camera is. You lose a little bit in the highlights compared to the M9, since you can’t recover blown highlights that are only blown in one channel. You probably gain in the shadows since the noise floor is lower. We’ll see. I hope to get my hands on one of these guys at the end of the summer and test it out next to some film to see if I can work with it. The files I’ve played with look pretty good already and I think I could bang out a look that I’m happy with. IF shooting the camera fits in with my sloppy shooting style. We’ll see. But this might be my next digital camera.

Other digital camera thoughts

I know I talked some stuff about the Fuji X-Pro1. Here’s my current thoughts on it. It looks like a great camera, but… The 18mm (28mm equiv.) seems to be just ‘alright’ as is the AF. I’d probably be ok with either of those, but the camera is not exactly cheap. You’re talking about $2500 for a setup that I might like, and that still leaves me lacking a good 21mm option.

I thought about (and am still thinking about) a 5DIII - I could probably be happy with the 28/1.8 (just ok, but cheap) and could always snag the 24/1.4. But it’s so big.

Then I realized/remembered that I really like my M lenses. They are all great. Only the 21/4.5 might prove difficult on a digital camera, and I can always get the Super Elmar-M 21/3.4. So I figured I’d wait it out until the Leica announcement on May 10th (for the M Monochrom) and I was pleasantly surprised. It won’t be available until the end of the summer, so we’ll see what comes out at Photokina, and if the M10 arrives and it looks good, then I’ll probably go with either the M-M or the M10. If the M10 sucks, then I might just jump on the M-M, assuming it delivers like I think it will.

And, the Olympus OM-D is looking pretty sweet. They sell a nice 12/2 (24mm equiv.) and a nice 14/2.5 (28mm equiv.), so I have backup/color options, which makes the M Monochrom that much more tempting.

Mesta press

2012-05-16T12:50:11Z

I read a cool article on the biggest forging press in the USA the other day. It’s worth reading. If anyone is interested in more info, you can find some on wikipedia and find some photos and other goodies at the Library of Congress. The photo content of this post is the awesome 4x5 scans at the Library of Congress link.

End of Kodak reversal films

2012-03-01T14:31:30Z

The last three of Kodak’s reversal films were discontinued today. RIP.

Due to a steady decrease in sales and customer usage, combined with highly complex product formulation and manufacturing processes, Kodak is discontinuing three EKTACHROME (color reversal) Films:

KODAK PROFESSIONAL EKTACHROME E100G Film KODAK PROFESSIONAL EKTACHROME E100VS Film KODAK PROFESSIONAL ELITE Chrome Extra Color 100 Film

We estimate that, based on current sales pace, supplies of these films are expected to be available in the market for the next six to nine months; however, inventories may run out before then, depending on demand.

This does not affect KODAK PROFESSIONAL Color Negative Films or KODAK PROFESSIONAL Black and White Films which remain a viable part of the KODAK PROFESSIONAL Film portfolio.

Interesting film comparisons

2012-02-05T12:09:36Z

I’ve been meaning to put links up to these film comparisons for quite some time. They are all large format, but they are incredibly well done and informative. The people who worked on them knew what they were doing and were pretty objective about the results, so while you might not get the exact same results as they do, the results are a great baseline to work from.

Color film comparison, Pt. 1
Color film comparison, Pt. 2
Color film comparison, Pt. 3
Big camera comparison - comparison between some really sweet large and medium format film cameras (on several different films) and a couple of top notch digital cameras.
Commentary on the camera comparison - Some commentary by the editors of the big camera test.

Kodak bankruptcy

2012-01-19T08:18:12Z

Looks like Kodak has finally declared bankruptcy. Hopefully the film group can emerge from this and still bring the stuff I like to market. Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer has nice post on this.

Canon 24 L II

2012-01-18T00:32:19Z

I recently borrowed the Canon 24 L II from work and shot with it for a weekend. Here are some of my thoughts on it. As a reminder, I’m a film shooter, and I mostly shoot on rangefinders, so this brief ‘review’ will be colored by that.

Background

As stated above, I’m a film shooter, and I mostly shoot on rangefinders. I do own a Canon 1V, along with a 50/1.4 and 28/1.8. I actually got started in photography as an adult with at Canon Digital Rebel (300D), the 50/1.4, and a 100/2.8 Macro. Along the way, I acquired the macro twin flash and a 17–40mm L, then sold them and the 100mm Macro, bought a 200/2.8 L II, and finally sold that.

Somewhere during the 17–40mm phase, I picked up a Canon 1V and started shooting mostly film. I soon transitioned to shooting on rangefinders, though I kept the 1V around. I mainly used it for shooting concerts. However, I got out of shooting concerts a couple years ago and started letting my girlfriend use the 1V. After that, I rarely used it unless I needed autofocus or weather sealing for something.

28mm is pretty much my favorite focal length and I’d be all over a 28 L if Canon ever released one. They haven’t. The 28/1.8 isn’t a bad lens—it’s small, relatively affordable, and reasonably well built. However, it’s not the best optically. Even on grainy B&W film, it lacks performance wide open, particularly at the edges. As a result, I’ve always thought about buying the 24 L, but never pulled the trigger.

Borrowing the 24 L II

So it turns out, I can borrow some photo equipment from work. Mostly crop digital cameras, but they do have the 24 L and 35 L on hand. As I have already decided that 35mm isn’t the focal length for me, I checked out the 24 L for the weekend.

Turns out there was a lot of snow, so the test subjects were my girlfriend while we were cooped up in the apartment, and some snow when we went out to the lake to ‘walk’ around. I shot two rolls of Tri-X and put up the results (with little editing) on flickr. They aren’t the most diverse set of pictures, but it turns out there really aren’t that many 24 L II pictures on the internet that are shot on film, let alone B&W film. So maybe this will be informative for the 3 other film shooters out there.

Thoughts

First of all, it’s a great lens. If you are an SLR shooter and want this focal length and speed, get it. I’m sure the Nikon version is just as good.

It’s sharp enough, focuses fast, and is f/1.4. What else do you want?

If you really want to split hairs, it appeared to be a bit soft wide open. Nothing major, at least for someone shooting Tri-X, but it’s not up to the standards of the Zeiss ZM 21/4.5 C-Biogon when shot wide open, but then again, it shouldn’t be. For you guys shooting 20+ MP cameras, you might find it a little lacking wide open compared to, say, the 135 L. It has some distortion (what SLR wide doesn’t?), but wasn’t noticeably on most shots. Here’s a shot where some barrel distortion was visible. It also flares a bit when the sun is just outside the frame (example)¹, but to be fair, I wasn’t given the hood when I got the lens. I’m sure that would help.

As far as sharpness goes, comparing to the 28 1.8 shows that the 28 can be a bit of a dog, especially near the edges. This is not a scientific test—just two hand held photos wide open in my kitchen. The 24 L is first and the 28 is second. Click through to see the whole image. You can select ‘original’ size once on flickr to see the full 2000 dpi scan. Also of note, on the 28mm shot, is the nasty smearing on the top right edge of the fridge (you have to look at the full size to see it).

24 L crop

28 1.8 crop

That this is visible on Tri-X in low light, hand held, is particularly telling. On the other hand, past experience tells me the Leica Summicron 28/2 is a good deal sharper than the 24 L in similar situations. Not that sharpness is everything. After using the 24 L, I decided that the 28/1.8 is good enough, particularly in light of its smaller size. I just can’t justify the 24 L for a camera I don’t shoot that much.

My biggest complaint about this lens is its size. In general, I find the 1V plus the 50/1.4 or 28/1.8 borderline too large. I’m really more comfortable carrying around a Leica M and a 28/2 all day compared to the larger SLR set. The 24 L made the camera just too large for me. I was seriously considering buying this lens and possibly downsizing my rangefinder kit, but using this lens reaffirmed the fact that I’m just not a (full-sized) SLR shooter. If I’m ever going to use a digital camera, it’s going to be something smaller than a 5D or D700, or even an APS-C DSLR. The developments in the mirrorless sector are a lot more appealing to me. If I were a wedding photographer or some other type of professional, SLRs are ideal tools, but as an amateur, I really value the compactness of my rangefinder kit.

As a side note, coming from a 28mm shooter, 24mm isn’t that different. Yes it’s a bit wider, but you can generally make up for that with a step or two in the right direction. What I did find was that 24mm starts introducing a bit too much perspective distortion near the edges for me when used like a 28mm. In other words, if I try to get the same shots (mostly of people) that I’d take with a 28mm, I have to step forward a step, and heads start getting a bit stretched near the edges. As a result, it’s kind of a neither-here-nor-there focal length for me. I find 28mm a better in this regard. For the framing I like and the working distances I like, 28mm is a great match. When I want something wider (with the increase in perspective distortion), I’d rather go with a 21mm lens. Of course, if I practiced more, I could probably do 90% of what I do with the 21mm & 28mm combination with just a 24mm lens…

Some day, I will get this lens if I end up shooting predominately SLR (seemingly more unlikely now than ever), but for now, I’ll pass.

A lot of pictures are of my girlfriend (hey, we got snowed in). Sorry about that.

This shot was also pretty overexposed, so the flare might be a bit exaggerated because of this.↩

Fuji X-Pro1

2012-01-09T10:26:34Z

Looks like Fuji is introducing a camera I might actually buy: the Fuji X-Pro1. Dumb name, but it’s an interesting looking camera system. As in interesting enough that I might eventually get one.

My camera preferences

I shoot mostly film. Actually, 100% film. I started on a Canon DSLR in 2004, but quickly transitioned to film and rangefinders for a variety of reasons, but the number one reason (after the fact that I like the look of B&W film) is the size of rangefinder cameras. While I don’t need an ultra compact camera, the reduction of size and volume one gets by using a camera like a Leica M6 over a Canon DSLR is pretty sizeable.

Over the years, I gravitated towards shooting mainly with a 28mm lens. My second most used lens is probably a 50mm lens (or a 21mm lens). I like have fast lenses so I have the option to shoot in dim light. So my main kit, the one I find necessary for me to consider a camera system, needs to have the following characteristics:

Relative compact — smaller than most full frame or APS-C DSLRs. And have smaller lenses. Think Leica M sized.
A 50mm f/1.4 or equivalent lens.
A 28mm f/2 or equivalent lens.

The last one is the tough one. I’d be ok with a 24mm equivalent, or even a 21mm equivalent, as long as it was reasonably fast (f/2 or faster). I can’t think of any camera system that has a 24–28mm lens that is f/2 or faster and is roughly the same size as a Leica M. Sure, Canon and Nikon have suitable lenses for their DSLRs, but they are huge. Sure, there’s a rash of new compact interchangeable lens cameras, but none of them have a decent fast wide in the 28mm range. 35mm doesn’t cut it for me.

As a result, I haven’t been tempted into buying a digital camera. I’ve thought about finally getting a 24L for my Canon 1V, and eventually buying a 5D (or whatever is current when I get around to it), but I’ve yet to do it. It’s just so huge.

The Leica M9

The obvious solution to my problems is to get a Leica M9. I have lenses for it already that meet my needs and it’s the right size. A couple problems with it:

The price. I can’t spend that much on a camera.
The price of the rest of the system. While I do have a good complement of M lenses, I’ll probably never buy another one, and can’t necessarily afford to replace the ones I have. They are just getting silly expensive. I don’t want this much money tied up in a system.
Other niggling issues like:
- Red edges.
- Can’t use my Zeiss ZM 21/4.5 lens on it.
- High ISO performance. I’d probably ok with it if it didn’t cost so much, but it does, so it better be a better performer than it is.

I’ve thought about waiting to see what the M10 offers, but even if everything is perfect on it, the price concerns still remain.

Enter the X-Pro1

This camera looks good so far. The specs are decent. And, as a first in any of the new camera systems as far as I know, it has the right complement of lenses for me. The 18mm f/2 is equivalent to the 28/2 I use most, and the 35mm f/1.4 is close enough to a 50/1.4 that I’ll never notice the difference. Assuming one can adapt M mount lenses to it, I can slap on my 50 Summilux ASPH or 75 Summilux whenever I’m feeling the need for a long lens. And it all looks to be about the right size for me. This picture pretty much sums it up.

As long as its high ISO performance is ‘decent’, I’ll be fine. Remember I’ve been shooting film; my preferred high speed film is Kodak P3200TMZ shot at 1600. It’s a grain fest. But not a banding fest. Grain is different than banding.

What really remains to be seen is the other bits of the camera. Are the lenses any good? What’s the autofocus performance like? What’s the interface like? If any of that stuff is buggy, I’ll probably pass. As it is, I’ll wait to hear some user reports before I take the plunge, but this is looking like it might be my next ‘real’ digital camera.

Links and further reading

Here’s some information on the camera and lenses (from Fuji), as well as a hands on preview from dpreview.com:

Fuji X-Pro1
Fuji X-Pro1 promotional site
Fujinon XF18mmF2 R
Fujinon XF35mmF1.4 R
Fujinon XF60mmF2.4 R Macro
Fujifilm X-Pro1 Hands-on Preview (dpreview.com)

Marked

2012-01-08T14:57:55Z

I write a lot of stuff in Markdown: this site (and others), general notes, and most of my note taking for work. Previewing your text is useful at times. Enter Marked. You open up the file you are editing in Marked and it keeps watch of it, automatically updating the preview whenever you save. Over the years, I’ve used a variety of Markdown previewers, from BBEdit’s built in preview, to writing my own preview script (which I had to manually update), to writing a quick Vim function to preview the current file in Safari. Not only does Marked work better and look nicer with less hassle, it also has some nice features, like letting you ignore YAML front matter if you wish.

If you do a lot of writing in Markdown, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Marked. It’s only $3.99 at the App store (OS X only).

Calling from Vim

You can call Marked from the command line in an incredibly obvious way: open -a Marked filename. I’m sure you could write a quick one liner and stick it in your .vimrc file, but instead, I added the following to ~/vim/after/ftplugin/markdown.vim:

fun! Preview()
    silent exec "!open -a Marked %"
endfun

nmap ,p :call Preview()<CR>

Nanoc

2012-01-07T22:51:48Z

Well that was fast! I recently, as in 3 weeks ago, converted my site to run on Octopress. And I just got done switching it over to nanoc.

That’s not to say I didn’t like Octopress. I did. A lot. It’s pretty easy to setup and has a great looking theme. In fact, I’m still using a slightly modified version of that theme for the time being. For most people who just want a blog, I think Octopress is actually better. However, as I detailed in my post about moving to Octopress, I had some issues with ‘articles’ in Octopress:

While Octopress does have the ability to process non-blog posts known as pages, these pages lack some of the feature set that posts have.

The thing is, this site is split between a blog and more of a collection of articles. I like the idea of having my articles show up in the RSS feed, though it isn’t crucial, but I didn’t particularly want them living in the same directory as my blog posts. I also didn’t like how non-blog posts were second class citizens. Furthermore, I really didn’t like how Octopress stores all the blog posts in the _posts directory.

In this manner, nanoc is way more flexible. All posts are the same—the only thing that differentiates a blog post and a non-blog post is setting the kind: attribute to ‘article’. It also appears to be faster in compilation (not a bad thing).

However, it really needed a lot of features to be added. That’s not to say I did a lot of programming to get this site up and running. I ported over the Octopress theme to erb and then had to piece together the “blog” functionality from postings on the net. nanoc actually comes with most of the tools in place, but they aren’t in place by default. I also had to do a bit of work to generate the tags and archive indices (the bulk of the code courtesy of http://leafstorm.us/). Lastly, it doesn’t integrate as well with things like Compass—I had to run the Compass watcher alongside the nanoc watcher. However, this is all minor stuff, things that a few Rake tasks could take care of easily.

At some point, I’ll do a more detailed posting about what I did and maybe even try to package it up as a ‘starter kit’. After all, that’s all Octopress really is—a starter kit for Jekyll.

For Sale

2012-01-05T15:45:00Z

Putting some stuff up for sale. Pictures can be seen here. If interested, send me an email at tgray at this domain. Note—I updated this post with a link to some pictures.

Hasselblad XPan - $1450

Hasselblad XPan

Absolutely fantastic camera. Comes with the 45mm lens. The camera finish has flaked a bit, which apparently happens a lot with the original XPans, but it’s not too bad. Everything works as it should. Lens is in great shape. Includes front lens cap (no rear lens cap) and B+W UV 010 filter. I do not have the lens hood, but have never really needed it.

I really enjoyed this camera for the bit I’ve owned it, but I don’t seem to bring it with me when I travel, which was the whole point. I really like to travel light, and I always seem to pack my two Leica M’s and three lenses over an M and the XPan.

$1450 via Paypal, fees and shipping included. I’d like to stick with US sales for now. While I’m open to international sales, the price would need compensation for higher shipping and paypal fees.

Pictures for can be seen here.

Relevant links:

Pictures I’ve taken with it
XPan vs. XPan II - Not the greatest English, but highlights the main differences between the two models.
Brief overview of the XPan
Manuals for the XPan cameras and lenses

Kodak color negative film comparisons

2012-01-04T18:37:00Z

Quite some time ago, I ordered a Macbeth Color Checker, a Kodak Color Separation and Gray Scale set, and some Kodak 120 film. I took it all with me on a nice sunny day and shot a bunch of frames with varying exposures, then had them all developed and scanned by NCPS.

While it was all minilab scanning, it was relatively consistent and gives you a sense of the differences between the films. Unfortunately, only two of them are made anymore. The results of each test can be found below:

Ektar 100
Portra 160NC (160NC-2)
Portra 160VC (160VC-2)
Portra 400NC (400NC-3)
Portra 400VC (400VC-3)
Portra 800 (800-3)

Not too long after, Kodak came out with Portra 400 and Portra 160, discontinuing the old NC/VC films. I used that as an opportunity to order some of the new and old 400 films and shoot a similar comparison, in 35mm this time, in sunlight, in tungsten light, and in tungsten light with a partial correction filter (KB 6). This time the film developing and scanning was done by Precision Camera. The results of each test can be found below:

Portra 400
Portra 400NC (400NC-3)
Portra 400VC (400VC-3)

Anyway, some of it’s moot now, since most of the films tested no longer exist, but maybe the Ektar, Portra 400, or Portra 800 shots are useful. I certainly convinced myself that all of these films can handle quite a bit of overexposure, and Ektar isn’t as nasty in the shadows as some claim (though it might take a little bit of PS work to get what you want).

All of the tests can be found collected together here.

Astronaut Suicides

2011-12-24T02:55:00Z

Astronaut Suicides is a fun photography concept.

Kodak announces Vision3 50D 5203

2011-12-15T18:03:00Z

It’s always good to hear a new film product being released. This time it’s Kodak Vision3 50D (5203), a replacement for Kodak Vision2 50D. We shot some Vision2 50D for H.P. Thomcraft 2—it’s great stuff.

Here’s some more info on 5203:

Moving to Octopress

2011-12-14T17:06:00Z

It was time that I did a revamping of my site. Long story short, I moved it over to Octopress. I’m liking it so far.

Site History

I originally wrote this website using BBEdit’s include functionality and served the generated static files. I also wrote some Python scripts that got called and inserted content in the web pages at the time of generation.

After that, I ran the website on PyBlosxom. Very nice and cool blog engine, but after playing with ikiwiki, I decided I wanted to go back to a statically served website that was less ‘bloggy’. By that I mean I wanted to organize non-blog pages, articles if you will, in the manner that I wanted to. So I decided to write my own Python script (pyopyo) to take my posts and convert them to a website. Tags and templates were supported with it.

Over the next several months, the script got reasonably sophisticated. I’m still interested in developing it, but the lack of blog like function started to annoy me. I have some ideas of how to implement that function, but for now, I decided to move the site to another platform to get what I need. No sense in putting off adding content to the site because I haven’t had the time/motivation to implement a necessary feature.

Octopress

That brings us to Octopress. In the software’s own words:

Octopress is a framework designed by Brandon Mathis for Jekyll, the blog aware static site generator powering Github Pages.

It’s actually quite like the program I was developing, only written in Ruby. It’s a bit further along than my program since it is based off Jekyll, which is in turn based on Liquid, a templating system. It has some features that I was missing, like the blog functionality, which in turn needs a pagination function. This was one of the demotivators for me in implementing a blog in pyopyo.

Furthermore, it’s got a really nice default theme and is based on some other new-to-me tech, like Sass and Compass. Needless to say, I’m going to start using these guys in other web projects.

Articles plugin

While Octopress does have the ability to process non-blog posts known as pages, these pages lack some of the feature set that posts have. So I wrote a Ruby plugin by trial and error (I have NO experience with Ruby) to find pages that have an ‘articles’ category and add them to the category index pages.

They are also added to the site object under site.articles, so you can access them through Liquid tags. For example, if you wanted to loop through all of the articles with the category of ‘articles’ (convenient to get a list of them all), you would use the following code on your page:

<div id="blog-archives" class="category">
{% for post in site.articles['articles'] %}
    {% capture this_year %}{{ post.date | date: "%Y" }}{% endcapture %}
    {% unless year == this_year %}
        {% assign year = this_year %}
        <h2>{{ year }}</h2>
    {% endunless %}
    <article>
    {% include archive_post.html %}
    </article>
{% endfor %}
</div>

You can see the above code in action on the Articles pages on this site. I also added similar blocks to the _source/category_index.html page to list articles under their appropriate category.

The plugin’s source is on Gist.

Other modifications

I’m basically using the supplied theme for the layout of the site. I did have to tweak one or two lines on a couple of files, but most of the changes are in non-theme files, like the supplied ‘custom’ layout and Sass files.

I also snagged a flickr aside.

Dust busting scans

2011-10-10T22:48:40Z

Dust is the enemy of photography. Every time I go to print or scan a negative and find dust on it, I consider switching to digital. Then I remember all the stories of people with dust on their sensors and having to correct hundreds of files. At least you can automate that.

The first and best way to obtain dust and scratch free scans is to have dust and scratch free negatives. Sometimes scratches happen and are unavoidable. But dust and water marks can usually be minimized. For water marks, use Photo-flo or a similar solution. I use it as described on my Film Processing page. Then hang your negatives up to dry in a dust free environment and handle them carefully after they are dry. Mine go immediately into sleeves for flattening, and only come out for scanning and printing.

Removing dust and scratches

Invariably, you will have some negative with dust and scratches. Now we have to remove the defects.

Fixing before the scan

If you do have some dust on your negatives, 20 seconds of work before you scan can save a lot of time. Get an air blower like a Rocket Blower or similar used for cleaning digital sensors. Blast your negatives before scanning. Even if you don’t inspect them closely, a couple quick puffs should remove large pieces of lint and dust and save you time later.

If you are willing to spend a bit more time, inspect your negatives by bouncing a light source off of the negative surface at an acute angle. If you see anything, flick it off with a fine tipped brush. You can get them at a craft store for a dollar or two.

The healing brush

Back in the day, all we had was the clone stamp tool in Photoshop. Now we have the healing brush. Use it. It handles the worst of your dust and scratches. Some areas might need the clone brush still. I’ve noticed you need to resort to the cloning tool when there is a blemish on a dark/light transition on the negative. The healing brush usually doesn’t get that right. But it’s great on areas of more continuous tone.

I just upgraded to CS5 and the ‘content aware’ option on the healing brush is really useful.

ICE

Scanners with Digital ICE are great. They can really save a lot of time dealing with dust and scratches on chromogenic films. It doesn’t work as well on Kodachrome (almost a moot point now) and not at all on B&W film. It does seem to affect sharpness all over the image on a minor level. This may or may not be an issue for you.

Dealing with RGBI files

However, Vuescan can save the IR channel in scans. I have a Photoshop action which processes this and makes it useable. It’s probably comprable to what ICE does, or what some of the 3rd party scanning programs do. The downside is that it takes some user input to deal with things, which ultimately takes your time. The upside is that it takes user input, which means you can selectively apply it to only the areas that are affected.

An added benefit of this user intervention is that you can use it on RGBI scans of Kodachrome. While I’ve never used it, apparently the Nikon Coolscan 9000 has a Digital ICE that can be used on Kodachrome. The Coolscan V does NOT. You can use it, sure, and it will fix dust and scratches. It will also ‘fix’ many dark/light transitions as well.

The Photoshop actions

This action set will let you process the infrared channel of an RGBI scan. The infrared channel is just stored as an alpha channel. It’s pretty low contrast, so in its regular state, it’s pretty useless. The first action in the set (Prep IR channel) prepares the infrared alpha channel by boosting the contrast and expanding the zones where dust and scratches appear.

The action Dust Bust - Spot Heal makes a layer above the base layer with the modified IR channel as a layer mask. It also auto selects the ‘spot healing brush’ tool. You can basically start using the tool on visible blemishes with the tool. Sometimes it helps to look at the layer mask to identify where the blemishes are.

The action Dust Bust - Spot Heal large is the same as the he action Dust Bust - Spot Heal except for the fact that it expands the area for the detected blemishes. I hardly ever use this action.

The action Dust Bust - D&S applies a ‘Dust and Scratches’ automated filter in an adjustment layer with the modified IR channel as a layer mask. This catches a lot of small blemishes and most of the large ones, but the handling of the large blemishes can leave something to be desired. I prefer to run this action after the Dust Bust - Spot Heal action but put it under that layer to catch anything I might have missed. This way the hand corrections done with the Spot Heal layer overlay any automated corrections done with the ‘Dust and Scratches’ filter, which can look a bit poor sometimes on larger blemishes.

The Healing top layer action just makes a layer on the top and selects the normal healing brush tool. You can use this to fix any blemishes that weren’t caught by the more automated tools.

Lastly, the Dust alpha removal just deletes the IR alpha channel.

I typically run them in this order:

Dust Bust - Spot Heal — correct large blemishes
Dust Bust - D&S — put it under the above layer
Healing top layer if necessary to catch anything that wasn’t picked up
Dust alpha removal
Merge or flatten the dust layers onto the base layer if you satisfied with things

The action set is here.