View towards Weston (Southampton) from Shore Road, Hythe. Taken just before sunset with the Leica M7 and Zeiss C-Sonnar 50mm f1.5 and a very very expired Fuji colour film. The vignetting and blur that you see here are characteristics from using the Sonnar wide-open.

Mouse-over to see the impeccable scratches added by Fotoprix when processing the negatives… painfully cloned-out with partial success using photoshop.

As if the scratches were not enough, I also hit problems using our Wacom tablet with photoshop. Pen-up events were not being recognised, causing all manner of mouse/tablet control chaos. This is due to an incompatibility between CS6 and MacOSX 10.10 – which fortunately was solved by installing the not-entirely-obviously named “White Window Workaround” plug-in for photoshop.

Photoshop’s repair tools are harder to use with scanned-film than with conventional digital images, as they tend to smooth out the grain. Mostly I used the “proximity match” mode with the spot-healing-brush tool, using short brush strokes. This seems to preserve the texture well, and gives good results with large areas of plain sky or water. For detail, the content-aware mode worked best – but needs to be used very sparingly to avoid loss of texture.

If you look closely at the two versions of the image, you can still see some traces of the scratches as fractionally brighter regions in the image. While this could be cleaned up completely, I ran out of patience and time. I have almost 100 images damaged in this way.