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Author Topic: Old Red slides  (Read 9211 times)

ced

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Old Red slides
« on: November 20, 2012, 07:16:15 am »

Hope this has not been covered elsewhere (made a search on the forums with no success).
How does one improve the results when digitising old red slides as just grey balance be it in the shadow, highlight or midtone doesn't get when close enough. Anyone with lots of experience dealing with this I would love to hear about it please.
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #1 on: November 20, 2012, 08:09:33 am »

What scanning software are you using? What scanner are you using? What kind of film are you scanning? Specifically what "recipes" have you tried that failed? It's hard to give useful advice without knowing more about your set-up and what you've done that hasn't been satisfactory.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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dmerger

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #2 on: November 20, 2012, 09:44:23 am »

Have you tried Lightroom?
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Dean Erger

Mark D Segal

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #3 on: November 20, 2012, 10:24:05 am »

Dean - true - LR can handle this kind of stuff like a breeze; but I'd like to get some insight into the OP's problem at the scan stage. The better the quality of the scan you bring into a post-scan editing workflow, the more flexibility you have for further high-quality image editing. Application usage and phasing are of course to some extent substitutable, but there is also "additionality", depending on the image requirements.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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dmerger

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #4 on: November 20, 2012, 11:20:41 am »

The better the quality of the scan you bring into a post-scan editing workflow, the more flexibility you have for further high-quality image editing.

Mark, if I understand you correctly (i.e. image editing in scan software), I suspect that you already know that I disagree.  My approach is to get the best "raw" scan and do all image editing in programs like LR and PS.  This is an old disagreement, so no need to rehash it.  We  agree, however, that LR, especially LR4, is fantastic.
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Dean Erger

Mark D Segal

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #5 on: November 20, 2012, 11:43:07 am »

Dean, there are different ways of doing things that allow different possibilities and different degrees of flexibility. What you say works - and often just fine, but there are other equally valid approaches and some things work better with some images than others, so I am not agreeing or disagreeing with what whatever you do. I'm just trying to get clarity about what is causing the problem the OP raised.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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AFairley

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #6 on: November 20, 2012, 01:13:39 pm »

Seems to me that the image recovery feature (for faded slides/prints - "Color Restoration" in Epson Scan, "Restore Fading" in VueScan, "Adaptive Color Restoration" in Silverfast) that is included in most scanning software would be the place to start, I would think that they it would be set up to specifically address how the image changes if the s/w is any good -- the few times I have tried it on faded to magenta Ektachromes, the Epson feature fixed the color cast as well as restoring the colors some. 
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #7 on: November 20, 2012, 01:54:02 pm »

I agree - these features often work very well, but we don't know whether or not the OP tried to use them - and if so with what specific software.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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ced

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #8 on: November 21, 2012, 04:38:55 am »

Slide reproduced via Leaf Capture with attempt there to alter the GBal, also taken to PS as RAW and LR3 but all types of manipulation don't give me a good enough start.  Slide type is Ekta but I have seen these problems in Agfa too.
I have a book on Lab by Margulis and have played around in Lab it is promising but ...
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #9 on: November 21, 2012, 07:20:20 am »

OK - good beginning to know what you are doing - no scanner - camera reproduction to raw converter. I don't know Leaf Capture, but in LR4, if you can't find any area in the photo that should be neutral and on which you can apply the white balance eye dropper, you can try the individual color curves in the Tone Curve Panel (not available in LR3, but definitely doable in Photoshop), as they may be able to neutralize the colour shift that has taken place over the years. I'd start with the Red channel. In Photoshop, again in the curves tool, if you can locate a point in the photo that should be black and set that point to black in each of the three colour channels that often does the trick completely. This problem should be capable of resolution without doing conversions in and out of LAB space.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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ced

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #10 on: November 23, 2012, 04:24:49 am »

Thanks those that have responded but are there no experienced readers in this type of problem that could throw some more light
on the subject?
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AFairley

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #11 on: November 23, 2012, 11:53:21 am »

There was a post somewhere on the LL forums form someone selling an ebook he had made about workflow for scanning Kodachromes, it's pretty cheap, US $10 or so.  I bought it and it contains a section on using a series of corrections using color channel curves to correct color casts, which can differ in shadows and lighlights.  You could check it out, should be easy to find with a forum search, the author is Guy Burns.
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #12 on: November 23, 2012, 12:02:00 pm »

Thanks those that have responded but are there no experienced readers in this type of problem that could throw some more light
on the subject?

What more *light* do you need thrown on this problem? You have images with faded dyes that cause opponent colours to dominate. Did you try the guidance I provided above to correct for that? Did you try any other ways of using curves to offset colour cast? If you aren't using scanning software, which can often handle this kind of problem easily, then you need to resort to curves in Lightroom or Photoshop to fix this.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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dmerger

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #13 on: November 23, 2012, 01:20:01 pm »

I’ve read several books about Photoshop and Lightroom.  Every one of them described methods to correct color casts.  I suspect that almost every book about PS or LR does the same.   However, while PS and LR each has many ways to correct color casts, I don’t recall any explicit description about removing red color casts from old slides. 
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Dean Erger

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #14 on: November 23, 2012, 02:07:15 pm »

I’ve read several books about Photoshop and Lightroom.  Every one of them described methods to correct color casts.  I suspect that almost every book about PS or LR does the same.   However, while PS and LR each has many ways to correct color casts, I don’t recall any explicit description about removing red color casts from old slides. 

Many of those books explain the principles of using curves, so if you understand the principles the application thereof should be a relatively straightforward intellectual progression. As well, trial and error never causes fatal problems in Photoshop as long as you do it with a Curves Adjustment Layer, and in LR you can go back in history as far as you need for correcting errors. More often than not, it just needs a bit of thinking, trying and soon thereafter - bingo - achieving.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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matt4626

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #15 on: November 23, 2012, 04:13:44 pm »

VueScan software scans to "RAW" so the white balance adjustment are available. Works with almost all scanners. I've working with really bad slides and had good results...FYI. ;D
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #16 on: November 23, 2012, 04:25:28 pm »

VueScan software scans to "RAW" so the white balance adjustment are available. Works with almost all scanners. I've working with really bad slides and had good results...FYI. ;D

Both Vuescan and SilverFast allow for white balance adjustments whether the image format is so-called "raw" or not; but the OP appears not to be using a scanner for digitizing the photographs, so he doesn't have the scan software for doing this. Therefore he needs to do it in an external image editor such as Photoshop or Lightroom.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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dmerger

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #17 on: November 24, 2012, 10:44:43 am »

Many of those books explain the principles of using curves, so if you understand the principles the application thereof should be a relatively straightforward intellectual progression. As well, trial and error never causes fatal problems in Photoshop as long as you do it with a Curves Adjustment Layer, and in LR you can go back in history as far as you need for correcting errors. More often than not, it just needs a bit of thinking, trying and soon thereafter - bingo - achieving.

Yes, most books describe the use of curves to remove color casts, but there are many other ways to do so, too. So, if Ced hasn't had success with curves, perhaps he'd have success with another option.
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Dean Erger

Mark D Segal

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #18 on: November 24, 2012, 10:50:59 am »

We don't really know what "ced" has actually tried and failed with, so pending more information we may be able to come up with something else for him to try. :-)
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Stephen G

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Re: Old Red slides
« Reply #19 on: November 27, 2012, 12:19:42 am »

I suggest the OP throws his captures at Kodak's Digital ROC software, if he has not tried that already.

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