n00b said:

AntcuFaalb said:

So maybe the best solution is for Harmy to not remove them, but to lower the contrast significantly in his color-correction.

Does that sound like a reasonable compromise?

I guess he already did that but lowering the contrast has its limitations, especially if the damage was done during the transfer from analogue to digital material.

It would probably be best to lower the contrast in a non-linear way (e.g., lowering the contrast more in "dark" parts of the image and "less" in light parts). This wouldn't be too hard to accomplish with Avisynth.