How To: Eliminate Banding From Your Scans

Its very common on some scanners to get a colour strip running vertical on film scans, its a problem known as image banding.

A lot of the time they can be reduced by making sure you have a spotless scanner, but sometimes I get a strip running down the side of my scans, in this example I have a faint red strip running vertical down the side of the image.

Lots of details can be found online as to why this can happen, and many different solutions, some may or may not work for you.

Im using a Epson V600 scanner.

Here is what I found

Running down the left side of this image you may see a faint red line..

Zoomed in view

I tried a few ways to solve this, but with no real luck, until I re-scanned the film but the other way round.
Keeping the film flat face down, simply rotating it around so it is scanned the other way round.
You must keep all the scanner settings exactly the same.

This put the red strip on the other side of the image

Red strip running down the right hand side.


For this I used GIMP
 (Gimp is a free and open-source raster graphics editor)

You can also do this in Photoshop, but Gimp is free to everybody so if you don't want to pay out, Gimp is worth downloading.

Step 1

Click on image and select open with Gimp

Step 2

Drag and drop in the 2nd image into the layers section

Step 3

Select the top image, and with the drop down menu click "Add Alpha Channel"

Also adjust the Opacity of the top image down to at least 50%
and zoom in onto a focal point of the image

Step 4

Your scanner may of scanned the images slightly off, so with the top image opacity down you can move the image around to line up with the image underneath.

Once done, adjust the top image opacity back to 100%

Step 5

With the Eraser tool, selected a nice feathered edged brush and simply brush out the red banding on the top image.
This will reveal the image underneath without the red banding

When done, simply flatten and  Export the image, I then used Lightroom to crop and adjust to suit.


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