Sunday, June 26, 2016

Saving Some Slides

Most of the family slides I've been scanning over the last couple of years are in pretty good shape considering their age, but a few of the oldest slides have started to fade or lose their colour. This slide depicts a sheep herd in Monument Valley sometime in the 1960s. Unlike most of our slides, it wasn't taken by a family member; it was purchased as a keepsake. I think it's a pretty cool image, so I was disappointed to see that most of its colour had faded to bright red. Thankfully I was able to use a number of Photoshop tools to restore some of its original colour, though without knowing how the original looked it's hard to measure the degree of my success. It still looks a bit washed out, but it's better than the pinkish-red hue that once filled the entire frame.
This shot from the same set of slides shows how badly the images have degraded over the years.

3 comments:

  1. The second slide looks like it could be a matte (sp?) painting for a 60s sci-fi movie.

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  2. Cheap film emulsion will fade to red. I guess expensive emulsion does too, but the process is slower.

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