7/20/2006

digital ice

Alot of the old Bronx negatives are pretty scratched and dusty and I spent lots of time cleaning them up, often at the 200% view in Photoshop. One or two of them took several hours this way. I'm still using the Minolta 5400. Anyway, since Digital Ice doesn't work with b&w I thought I'd see what happened if I scanned the tri-x shot in as color / output to RGB. Then I figured I'd convert it to b&w. What an odd effect. The scan looked like it had gone through a high gaussian filter or vaseline on glass (which actually was used in the old days). It did remove all the scratches and dust, but it also removed a tremendous amount of detail. Buildings where you could see each individual brick were now brickless. Had a sort of film noir look to it - like in a scene where the hero gets bonked on the head.

I'll post the scan once my cable modem is fixed up.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dave- Thanks for the update on your ICE / B&W experiment. I had a feeling it wouldn't work but I was still interested in the result.

barrett- Even if they are brand new from the developer there is usually some dust and even then its a pain to remove using the clone and healing tools especially if the dust is over very fine detail stuff in the image (say hair for example).