Questions and postings pertaining to the usage of ImageMagick regardless of the interface. This includes the command-line utilities, as well as the C and C++ APIs. Usage questions are like "How do I use ImageMagick to create drop shadows?".
1)create mask -- white where image and black where noise
2)do median filtering of whole image
3) composite the original and the median filtered version with the mask so that the mask gives back the original except where noise (black in mask) and there it uses the median filtered image.
The key to good 'spot' removal is how to determine the replacement colors.
You may like to look at this old article on 'text removal' which is basically the same method as what Fred describes. It looked at using morphology, and blur to determine colors, viewtopic.php?p=41498#p41498
A new technique, is to extract the pixels around the unwanted area and use -sparse-color to 'diffuse' just the edge pixels into the undesired parts. That is then used with the mask to replace the unwanted parts.
Thanks for the replies, it will take me a while to study fmw42 scripts, you have a lot there. After a quick look the Zelda example - http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/photos/#removing - looks good and I have it working in a loop on multiple images. Except I get a small black artifact in the dust spot, but so far it looks very promising.
Note that JPEG is lossy. That 'dust spot' may be larger than expected, whcih would result in
a slight discolouration if your removal mask does nto cover them properly.