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Author Topic: Can 3d look of slides be recreated?  (Read 554 times)

dreed

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Can 3d look of slides be recreated?
« on: August 16, 2021, 03:07:57 am »

After scanning in some slides, I decided to try looking at them in a hand held viewer to see if they were correct.

What I saw was a bit startling - the pictures in the hand held slide viewer had a "depth" to them that I just don't see in the scanned copies on the screen.

Is it possible to recreate that impression of depth in the slide viewer with photoshop or a plugin?
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NateWeatherly

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Re: Can 3d look of slides be recreated?
« Reply #1 on: October 25, 2021, 11:59:59 am »

 The trouble is that slides have both a wider (more saturated) color gamut and a higher contrast ratio than any monitor can display. Because of that you'll never be able to exactly replicate the look of a slide on a light table exactly, but you can get pretty close, especially if you are viewing it on a wide gamut screen like an Apple device with P3 gamut or an AdobeRGB display.

First thing to do would be to use DCamProf or Lumariver Profile Designer to make a custom raw DNG/ICC profile using, ideally, an IT8 target (or, even better, a target with more patches like a Hutch Color Target) on a slide using the same stock (or at least the same manufacturer) as the slides you're duplicating with the scanner (or camera and light source) that you're using.

After that you'll need to work out how you want to tone map the image of your slide to display on your screen. Some slides can have up to 13 stops of density (~10000:1 contrast ratio) but even high end monitors max out at around 10 stops and most monitors can only display a contrast range of about 8 stops. So when you scan a slide with, say, 12 stops of density and display it on a monitor that can only display 8 stops you either end up with highlight/shadow clipping or a 25% reduction in contrast and saturation and you'll have to use exposure compensation/tone curves to compress highlight and/or shadow detail to approximate the midtone contrast and saturation that you saw in the slide
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langier

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Re: Can 3d look of slides be recreated?
« Reply #2 on: October 25, 2021, 12:22:53 pm »

Part of that "3 D" look can be attributed to the optical magnifier of your viewer. The lenses are generally injection-moulded plastic and suffer from optical issues, including chromatic fringing. The illumination system can be just as marginal/bad. That bad lens seems to make the color transparencies take on a 3 D-like affect that I haven't found a way to duplicate.

Back in the day it was usually more fun to take a stack of slides and run them through that small viewer than to put them on the light table and look at them carefully with the high-end loupes.

Found memories of the old tech...
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Larry Angier
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