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Fogged photograph of a dog. Shot on 35mm. Scanned from print.
Fogging removed from the image and pupil reflection corrected.
Foggy Dog
Fogging can be a difficult to remove due to the wide area that it tends to cover. Trying to clone your way out of this wide area fogging is practically impossible. If the film has not been exposed too much, then the extent of this light contamination will be limited to the red channel leaving us with at least the blue and green to work with. By copying the necessary parts of the good channels over to the red, we can then re-colour the resulting GGB/GBB composite to resemble the original RGB one. Some areas of the red channel should be unaffected by the fogging so that we can sample the RGB values from there; otherwise you may as well just treat the job as a colourisation based upon the green or blue channel.
Fixing red/green eye on a dog is not as simple as fixing the same problem on a human. Typically, all of the channels will be affected to the extent that you will not be able to take pixels from one to repair another. In these cases the only option is to simply paint a new eye: A large brown circle beneath a smaller black one followed by one or more specula highlights. The most ardent dog lover would never know the difference. If you don't like the idea of painting them, you could always clone the eyes of another dog - too much like hard work though, in my opinion.
Film is not dead yet.
35mm film is being kept in the loop by its use in the flourishing market of Single Use Cameras. SUCs provide a cheap and carefree means of taking photographs (avoiding the worry of camera damage or theft). Holiday makers and clubbers are among the top consumers of these disposable cameras as they are the ones most likely worry about losing or damaging a relatively expensive digital model. There are also many older people for whom the digital camera represents a scientific instrument as indecipherable as the Positronic Differential Quantum Transponder Matrix* - to these people the attraction of the simple point-and-shoot disposable camera is obvious.
Even when film is completely eliminated from the consumer market there are still countless millions of negatives out there and these negatives represent a visual record of the entire twentieth century. The digital era represents less than a decade so far, and due to the lack of cost and ease of use that digital photography provides and promotes, we are taking more photographs than any time in history - though the vast majority of this abundance of digitally captured images would not have been considered worthy, a decade ago, of committing to a costly frame of 35mm film.
The digital SUC is not far away. Some digital disposables did enter the market though their implementation was experimental and short lived.
*The Positronic Differential Quantum Transponder Matrix does not exist - but I'm working on one. It's going to be yellow.
