Sometimes a scanned negative looks just like the one in the picture: Although there’s an area, like the snow, that should have a coherent tone, it’s sometimes darker and sometimes brighter - there’s even vignetting on the right side. In the darkroom this means to dodge and burn until you get away with it but this takes usually a lot of time. But in Photoshop everything’s a little easier.

1. So lets open the image we want to correct.
2. Now choose Layer > Duplicate Layer and hit Enter or just drag in the layers-panel the background layer onto the icon with the new sheet, the 2nd icon from the right.

   

3. Now with the focus on the new layer choose Filters > Noise > Dust & Scratches. Here you enter a very high value for radius and a 0 for tolerance. We want our motif to disappear completely so only a blurry gray with the incorrect levels remains. Then hit OK.

   

4. Now hit the shortcut Ctrl+I or go to Image > Adjustments > Invert to turn the blurry layer into a negative.
5. In the layers-panel keep the focus on the blurry layer and change its blending mode from Normalto Overlay.

   

6. That’s it - your image should have improved apparently. Notice the soft and realistic contrast in the picture.

How it works

The pixels of a layer set to Overlay change the layer(s) below in the following way: The RGB-value of pixels brighter than #7f7f7f (that’s exactly 50% gray) is added to the pixels of the layer(s) underneath, RGB-values darker than #7f7f7f are subtracted from the lower layers’ pixels.

Sounds a bit confusing but in our example it means that our blurry negative softly compensates the wrong tones in the original. A downside may be the resulting lower contrast, but usually that’s what we want to achieve in these cases.

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