I have a pile of old photos, literally (printed, loose or in albums and slide boxes) and figuratively (image files). Many of these are quite dirty: with dust, hairs and (particularly with scanned slides) black edges. Even fingerprint damage in places.
I also have a bunch of tools for processing photos.
But the tools just don't seem to meet my need for bulk cleaning of images. Look up guidance on how to use them, and it either seems to involve
- using some 'heal' brush on each bit of dust (really not practical for a really dusty image),
- or applying some 'remove dust' filter, which (for the tools I have) seems to change too much of the image, leaving non-dusty and interesting bits of the photo blurred,
- or using a modern scanner with some sort of infrared detection of dust and hairs (and re-scanning everything?).
So, time to see if I can do something that meets my need better.
Using Shiny to build a simple web application and ImageMagick to do the image processing, I think I've got quite close. The main thing I like about my approach is that you can see directly where the dust has been found, and only those pixels get changed. So you don't notice later that the faces, hair or clothes have lost focus.
The code is up at GitHub, which also has links to a shinyapp.io instance (though you're probably better running the code on your own machine).
Not perfect, but the workflow is quite quick for me now. Some of the scans done 15 or 20 years ago are jpegs, which isn't ideal.
In future, a 'batch' version could be implemented pretty easily, but I think I need to experiment with more images before doing that.
