This is a very short article in words, but it did take some time to put together the accompanying illustrations. Basically I have been holding off on attempting a major retouching job with Lightroom until it had enough retouching tools. Now that it has dodge and burn in addition to spot removal (cloning and healing), I thought it might be time to attempt it.

I have a fairly good sized collection of old film images (don't we all) that have been damaged by all manner of filth and fungi over the years. I do want to save these images, but if possible I would like to do it without too much work. I am extremely lazy when it comes to these things (which is why I am not, and never will be a Photoshop Master of any sort). On the other hand Lightroom does not really feel like work to me, so I would love to have Lightroom be able to handle this kind of job.

Don't be afraid to tell me how dumb this experiment is and how I can do it a lot easier in Photoshop CS or some other application (but please be kind enough to include step by step instructions).

Image 1 - you can see the amount of filth in the light area of the image, the right hand side has already been retouched.

Image 2 - this the same area with repeated image healing treatments to keep the original film grain look without blurring or distorting it too much.

Image 3 - the image with the upper left hand corner retouched (by the Lightroom healing tool). I still have a lot of work to do on the image, but I think you can see that the obvious dirt in the top left corner has been removed. I am not sure that this method can be used for producing large gallery prints, but it does seem to be good enough for on-line publication.

Sadhu photographed in Kathmandu, Nepal by George Mann