Have you ever taken what you thought was the perfect photo only to discover it includes a minor blemish? Or maybe working with older photos which have suffered through time? Way back in 1975 my lovely wife and myself took off on a trip around Australia which ended up lasting almost two years. In those days I had a Pentax SLR camera and, for the sake of convenience, pictorially documented the trip per medium of a collection of 35mm slides.
Come the digital age and I decided to resurrect the old slides and scan them all across to my hard drive. The only problem was that some of them had collected blemishes which, of course, also scanned across. So I was particularly pleased to come across a free blemish remover which is not only extremely simple and easy to use but also very effective.
Aptly named Free Photo Blemish Remover, this freeware from LifeSniffer does a very good job. The GUI is plain and simple yet very intuitive and not cluttered with a plethora of unnecessary buttons and options:
As you can see menu items are defined by icon buttons, but you can also display a text description of each function by simply hovering the mouse cursor over an icon. Operation itself is literally child’s play: Use the slider to adjust the “Spot Size” so it suits the size of the blemish (spot size should be just slightly larger than the actual blemish). Move the spot size circle over the blemish and then just left click the mouse… and like magic, the blemish is gone. When finished, simply save the cleaned image to the hard drive.
Not sure what caused the blemishes on some of my older slides but I would imagine fly specs would be the most likely culprit. Whatever the cause, Free Photo Blemish Remover certainly did a fine job removing them:
There is also a free tool called Clone Stamp available from the same developer which is more suitable for working with larger blemishes/areas – read more about Clone Stamp Tool HERE
Download Clone Stamp Tool from FreewareBB HERE: 2.84MB exe
