What is Digital ICE?
Digital ICE enables scanners to automatically detect and repair scratches and remove dust particles when scanning negatives or slides.
Although scanners and scanning software keep on evolving and become better with every update we can't emphasize enough how important it is to clean your negatives and slides before actually scanning them.
Digital ICE – What it can and what it can't do
Understanding Digital ICE Technology
Digital ICE is a fairly old technology dating back to the late 80s. It automatically "cleans" and "repairs" negatives and slides from scratches and dust. The actual process is split up into two parts.
The first part is taking place in the hardware of the scanner. The scanning unit contains a pair of light sources: an RGB light source and an infrared light source. The first cycle creates the actual scan using the RGB light source. In the second cycle, the negative or slide is scanned again with the infrared light source. As damaged or covered areas reflect that light differently the scanner is able to detect these areas and automatically mask them.
The second part, the actual "repair," is performed by an algorithm which analyzes the surrounding pixels of the damaged areas. By doing so it is able to predict what pixels are missing and adds them to the affected area.
When does it make sense to use Digital ICE?
Digital ICE works wonderfully with homogenous areas and on the complete opposite with areas that don't follow a specific pattern. Everything in-between often causes glitches or artifacts. This becomes especially obvious when applying Digital ICE on damaged faces.
Why is that?
The algorithm only works with mathematically predicting what pixel is missing and does not grasp the concept of the object it is trying to fix. The algorithm doesn't know that it is currently "repairing" a face and that a face needs two eyes, a mouth, and a nose.
Vice versa the algorithm does a great job where there is no real concept to grasp, like sky or grass.
What about Artificial Intelligence?
The algorithms operating in your scanner software are everything but intelligent. Recent developments in A.I. are showing promising results for the future. These neural networks have been trained with tens of thousands of images. This enables them to get a better understanding of the context and the objects they're repairing. However, the technology is still very far away from being applied to new scanners and software.
Should I use Digital ICE or not?
Whether you should use Digital ICE or not depends on the photo you are scanning. Small disrupted areas in non-vital parts of the image can easily be repaired with Digital ICE technology. Images which have suffered severe scratches or damages have to be properly repaired with the means and techniques of photo restoration.
What about dust?
Unlike scratches or other damages dust often is only covering specific areas on the surface. It is possible to carefully remove these particles without damaging the photo or negative. It is crucial to understand that it's always better to physically clean negatives or slides than applying Digital ICE to your scan. Especially when scanning 35mm film small dust particles can already hide important details of your photograph.
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