If you drop by here very often, you may remember that I’ve posted before about my efforts to recover some old slides I took in Chaco Canyon nearly 30 years ago.
Long story short, at the time I was in college and made far too much use of film from an outfit in Seattle — it was billed as “surplus” movie film, and the idea was that when you sent in your film to be developed (only the film vendor could / would do this), for very little money (relatively) you got back slides, prints, and a negative. It was a great deal at the time, but all the pictures I took with the stuff are aging horribly — mostly turning red, with some very weird emulsion degradation showing up.
So once I noticed this happening (the slides looked fine a year or two back, but were dramatically worse when I dug them out again this spring), I figured I’d better move fast to get the images into the digital domain before they were lost for good. For my first attempt, I tried using a slide scanner attachment on an old (3 Megapixels) digital camera I’ve still got rattling around in a closet. Not an ideal approach, it turns out, but it gives you a good idea of the slide’s current condition:
So I tinkered around with the slide a bit in Aperture and managed to tweak it to this:
Better, but still not what I was looking for. The slide attachment (and old camera) led to some weird distortions around the edges of the frame. And the resolution is low. And the colors are still odd. So I picked up a not-too-expensive slide scanner (just $150 these days at Amazon). It gives me scans with much greater resolution — but of course that also means you get an even closer view of the bad spots on the slide. Anyway, when it comes to color correction, between the scanner’s hardware and software capabilities, it did much of the work for me:
Still, there was a lot of recovery left to do. The sky is mottled, and weird green blobs are all over the image (some of the film grain has turned clear; when the overall red tint is corrected, the clear / white spots turn green). Oh, and don’t forget the scratches!
So it took me 5 or 6 hours of hand labor in PS Elements and Aperture, but I cleaned up the sky and retouched all the green blobs and scratches in the image — resulting in this:
A pain in the neck, but worth the work I think.
Get the RSS Feed
September 2nd, 2009 at 08:34
Great work restoring this slide. I have been thinking of trying to save some of my fathers old slides and I am going to look into the scanner you used! Thanks!