LaserSoft Imaging SRDx Plugin Review

Everybody who is developing film at home knows that dust is your worst enemy and while it is surely the best practice to avoid getting dust on your negatives, it seems like a fight that we cannot win. In the end there are always small dust particles on the film which we need to be cloned out during post-processing after scanning. If you print in the darkroom you have no other choice than cleaning your negatives carefully before putting them into the enlarger. Canned air and dust blowers as well as small brushes are your best weapon if you want to avoid the elaborate manual retouching process. Digitally we have other tools available. Among the clone and healing tools in Photoshop we can also work with filters. These filters target defects and blend these defects into the surrounding pixels. Photoshop has its own "Dust & Scratch" filter which already works nicely. Of course you cannot expect magic and manual retouching with the afore-mentioned tools is always required especially for larger defects as the filters have a harder time to deal with them. LaserSoft Imaging, the company behind SilverFast has recently released a Photoshop plugin for this task. Everybody who is using their scanner software might have noticed a new filter which is called SRDx. This filter especially targets defects that cannot be detected by hardware based infrared dust and scratch removal.