Handling dust and scratches in Aperture

Hi all,
I have been looking for some kind of tool within Aperture that might be able to help dealing with dust and scratches on scanned film.
For dust spots, the spot and patch tool seems to help, but for scratches and other fine blemishes that take the form of lines instead of circles, the spot and patch tool does not seem to be able to handle it.
Another thing that doesn't seem to be supported is the case where two blemishes are very close together.
Is there another tool inside Aperture that I should be using?
A round trip to photoshop unfortunately blows away any advantage you get by using the raw workflow.
Is there something obvious that I am missing?
Regards,
Graham
--

No -- Aperture's spot and patch tools work on round things. You can't clone a big long scratch out of something like you can with Photoshop in using the clone tool.
No real way around that -- Aperture is a photo editor not a pixel editor (they're quite different things under the hood). You'll need to round trip to Photoshop for these kinds of things (hence the 4x or 5x file size increase you get... from using a pixel editor . I wouldn't say this "blows away" all of Aperture's advantages, but yes if you're retouching a few hundred old scratched photos it will be a pain. But Aperture's core strength is in workflow for shooting with a digital camera and sorting, keywording, and doing light to medium editing. It's not going to compete with Photoshop for heavy retouch work or stuff often started from scanning negatives.

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Handling dust and scratches in Aperture

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