The Quality of Colour Slides : "The Anonymous Project"

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

But on the question of colour, it takes human discretion to decide what to do with an old photo. This is a photo of my mother, taken by my father, using a plate camera in 1945:



Colour restoration required some guesswork:

[Dave2002]

Great care is needed.

Most old photos are irreplaceable!

I haven't been asked to do old photos - yet. Mostly just people who have managed to reformat their SDHC cards or overwrite them somehow, and usually it's the most recent things they really want. I don't guarantee results, and they get their original memory back, plus digitised versions on suitable media.

I have done some of my own old photos though - family images - and they don't go out of the house. Your recolouring of your mother's photo looks very plausible. I almost recognise the colours and fashion styles.

[Lat-Literal]

However it could still be worth digitising some. You could then send electronic copies to others if you wished, or build up a digital album. Also, good digital copies might help to protect against future accidents - or other problems which you may not anticipate. Note the comments about how many it might be possible to do each hour, but even so, if you only have around 300 slides, then it should be possible to digitise and fix them all in less than a day's work (total - say 10-24 hours spread over several days). There would be the cost of the equipment, though an alternative might be to have them scanned by a professional. Note though that some professionals have been known to lose originals or damage them - so you might prefer to try yourself first.

I'm not intending to slur professionals in general, but if you had some slides which you felt were "priceless" to you, then you might not want to let them go anywhere out of your control.

Thank you Dave - and to everyone else for further useful advice.

Eine:

I think in the example you have provided you have made an extremely good job of it and well done but if I say I like the two photos equally that underpins my (perhaps peculiar) point.

(I would admit, though, that 1945 - and a plate camera - is in slightly different terrain)

[Dave2002]

I think in the example you have provided you have made an extremely good job of it and well done but if I say I like the two photos equally that underpins my (perhaps peculiar) point.

(I would admit, though, that 1945 - and a plate camera - is in slightly different terrain)

Looking at my old photos - one of which fell out of a folder recently, I notice that most of mine are b&w prints - typically very small.

Colour - 1945! Large plate format. That must have been ahead of its time, surely. Well, at least as far as the "average" man in the street was concerned.

[Dave2002]

Since the last post I have been experimenting with negatives and scanning, as well as scanning b&w prints.

B&W prints seem the easiest, followed by b&w negatives. So far I've had very limited success with colour negatives, and I've not even tried colour slides.

I hadn't realised until very recently the difficulties with coloured negatives. B&W negatives are more or less that - so a scan then invert process can recover perhaps 80% of the image quite quickly. However this is still a bit rough and ready, and although the outputs may look OK, for example with people wearing what seem to be white shirts or blouses, which look plausible, it is odd to suddenly discover by a very small tweak that the clothes actually have patterns. Once that is known it is then interesting, but difficult, to try to recover the detail in the rest of the image. Makes one realise just how good the old chemical processes actually were. Also very small tweaks can make a big difference to the way people look - even with b&w photos.

Going on to colour negatives things get worse. Colour negatives have a strong orange tint, and ideally this should be removed before attempting any colour inversion. So far my attempts on this have been very hit and miss, and colour may refuse to show itself - until a very small adjustment gives a clue as to what needs to be adjusted in order to get some colours to appear. Again, whatever the deficiencies of chemical colour processing, generally the results are very good compared to what I'm achieving at the moment.

I'm sure it's possible to do better, and I've seen what seem to be very good results from other photographers - though still with some adjustments required. However some are very much better than what I've managed to achieve so far. My hunch is that it's going to be easier to work from colour prints than from the equivalent negatives, though in some cases there may not be any prints to work from.

I have been trying to work with my Epson all in one printer, which also has a scanner. I didn't think it was capable of doing this, but perhaps it really is - it's the tweaking afterwards which is very time consuming.

See https://petapixel.com/2017/02/01/edi...ves-photoshop/

and also https://scantips.com/basic13c.html

and http://www.jeffreysward.com/editorials/colorneg.htm

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Dave 2002, this would do the job very well.

https://www.epson.co.uk/products/scanners/consumer-scanners/perfection-v550-photo

[Stanfordian]

But on the question of colour, it takes human discretion to decide what to do with an old photo. This is a photo of my mother, taken by my father, using a plate camera in 1945:



Colour restoration required some guesswork:

With such an increase in traffic one wouldn't want to stand in the road there nowadays I expect. It looks as if the metal chains have been taken from between the concrete posts, serving as railings, for melting down for war use.

The picture looks excellent now.

[gurnemanz]

Dave 2002, this would do the job very well.

https://www.epson.co.uk/products/sca...ion-v550-photo

I bought one of these last year specifically to scan slides of which I have very, very many. I spent about a week and a half going through old slides dating from a period between 1966 and 1995, picking out a few that were of interest and worth digitising (a lot were not). I ended up with about a thousand. It was fun to discover them again, eg some of my dear wife as a young woman, and the results were pretty good and some enhancement was possible, if necessary, using my editing program of choice, Photoscape. If I work out how to do it I might add a couple here.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Dave 2002, this would do the job very well.

https://www.epson.co.uk/products/sca...ion-v550-photo

The thing about photo scanners like this is that they sort out the difficulties of colour negatives in an instant.

[Stunsworth]

If you’re going to use a flatbed scanner to scan negatives and slides you need use one that can shine a light through the film - most flatbeds shine a light onto the surface of the object being scanned, that won’t work for film. The scanner mentioned above is one that would work.

[Dave2002]

If you’re going to use a flatbed scanner to scan negatives and slides you need use one that can shine a light through the film - most flatbeds shine a light onto the surface of the object being scanned, that won’t work for film. The scanner mentioned above is one that would work.

Thanks for pointing that out. I have had success with scanning prints with the all-in-one unit and some almost acceptable results - with a lot of tweaking, with b&w negatives. I uase Affinity photo for the post tweaking.

However colour is barefly feasible, and the explanation that the light needs to shine through the negative or transparency makes sense. Also, doing things on a reflective flat bed picks up a lot of surface scratches, dust and other noise. Pity those good scanners are quite expensive though, but I might try the one suggested above. Some others are a lot more expensive, though I did help someone a few years ago with a presentation after an exhibition at the National Theatre, and the scanner he used was obviously very good, but I think he said it was in the £000s.

As a means of checking that there are images which might be rescued, flat beds might show the potential of each negative. Presumably if there are only a few negatives or slides of interest there are pro shops which can do this sort of thing for less than the cost of a pro scanner, though there is a risk that they might lose the originals - hopefully slight, but mentioned previously.

Is the V550 the best compromise between quality and price - generally speaking? I would need one which is Apple Mac compatible - i.e. with software which would be compatible.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

If you’re going to use a flatbed scanner to scan negatives and slides you need use one that can shine a light through the film - most flatbeds shine a light onto the surface of the object being scanned, that won’t work for film.

[Dave2002]

There is also this method ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgOTk4ApEYs&feature=youtu.be

If needs must .... At least enjoy the clip!

Interestingly the quality did seem to be better with the home brew method, but I think it's not really for everyone. Cheapskates!

[Dave2002]

I am now more and more in awe of the processing which went on in film - both b&w and colour.

I have now used the computer screen lightbox method (see video in previous post) to process a b&w negative and also some colour negatives by photographing
them in RAW mode. The b&w photo doesn't look that much different from the results using the flatbed scanner, but the colour photos are slightly better - though in reality not much, but the colour does start to come through. At least this works to the extent that if there are people in scenes it's possible to see who they are, but it's very primitive. Obviously the film scanner methods ought to give very, very much better results. I haven't found an automatic way to adjust the orange tint in the colour negative - surely with some photo packages it ought to be possible to create presets to do that kind of thing.

One issue for me right now is that I'm trying to reduce "stuff" not acquire more, so although a slide/film scanner would be a good thing to have, ideally I wouldn't want one to take up a lot of space. It looks as though the V550 is quite sizeable, though it seems to be good - with a possible query over Mac compatibility - though one Am reviewer indicates compatibility with Sierra. It also looks as though the V550 isn't just a film scanner, but will do regular scanning as well - and hopefully gives high quality results.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Epson-Perfection-Scanner-ReadyScan-Technology/dp/B00ECBRW5E/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1512553877&sr=1-1&keywords=v550#Ask

I very recently found another use for my all-in-one scanner - which to my delight and surprise almost works. We have some old documents - a recipe book produced by - well you know who - for a course she was running - probably about 30 years ago. We originally produced the notes on very primitive kit (Sinclair QL perhaps!) and printed the notes off on a dot matrix printer. Now the notes are somewhat faded, but still in use for some recipes. Last time I tried to do automatic OCR conversion - quite a few years ago - of this material the results were abysmal. This time I used the scanner to get a high enough resolution file, and then submitted the output to one of the online OCR sites to convert it to Word. My first attempt was maybe 70% satisfactory, with the text from the top part of the page somewhat scrambled. Then I thought to rescan with some modifications to the scanning process, followed by processing the scanned result in a photo package to enhance the overall contrast, and then resubmitted the image to the online OCR service.

This resulted in perhaps a 98% accuracy of the text - so only modest text editing would be required to get it perfect, and also somewhat interestingly, the service managed to select a display font which looked quite similar (but better - without the obvious dot patterns) to the original type.

Here is the OCR service - https://www.onlineocr.net/ Although I'm not a great fan of using online services this does seem to work rather well, and maybe I should use this while it still works and appears to be free. I only have about 50 pages to do anyway, and there's no confidential material to convert.

So now I've got two projects to investigate for the future - dealing with negatives and slide photos, and digitising a recipe book. Perhaps both can go on the back burner for a while, or at least until after Christmas.