restoring old ektachrome slides

Is there anything white/grey in the picture? It seems there is a toy snowman in this one. or maybe the picture frames? Use the whitebalans pointer. It works with the orange of negatives.


(Isn't it Ektachrome?)

Looking at the tone curve, the green has dropped down and the red has moved up. Simply shifting them sideways takes away most of the colour cast.
It's difficult to correct without knowing how red the shirt and couch are, and the deep blacks are going to be shaded a bit. How realistic does this look?



This was a quick and dirty trial in playmemories, but if you try this in LR and save the presets you can do it as a batch to the lot, then tweak individual ones worth doing. To be honest, I'd want to check some outdoor shots first as indoor shots were notoriously difficult to get right. Even Ektachrome 160 tungsten didn't always work well and if you used the usual outdoor film they could look quite poor even before they aged.

Oh, I pulled the RGB tone curve down a bit just left of centre to reduce the veiling. This usually helps a little, but get the whites and blacks right first (if you can).

My guess is the wallpaper is now too purple, but correcting that pushes the deep shadows green. It may have looked off when it was done originally, though!

Edited by Miranda F - 27 January 2021 at 23:03

sybersitizen wrote: That's really bad deterioration. I was able to get something like normal color from it with a lot of massaging in Photoshop using a combination of operations including Variations adjustments, but it was certainly not a single-click solution. http://thesybersite.com/public/Adjusted_Ektachrome.jpg

The sofa and tabletop look more believable but I think most of the colour has been lost in that version, Syber. The lampshade looks like it should be red.

Thanks to all three of you!

I have since learned that the green and blue tints used in the Ectachrome slides fades over time. I suspect that I will have to boost green and blue to match red or bring all three back into balance. Not knowing the rate at which the green and blue faded over time suggests that this may be a manual process based on the age of the slide.

I will keep you all posted on my progress

Cheers... Brian

+1

Since I had at some time a large lot of Kodachrome slides which had acquired a very dominant orange coloring I used an Kodachrome IT8 target for calibrating my scanner (Nikon) using the Silverfast software. After the calibration the strong orange cast vanished completely from the scans (sorry I really don't know much why this works so well).

I have checked - Siverfast is currently only offering targets for Fujifilm. But I have seen that there are quite a number of third-party offerings. You might be lucky if you find an Ektachrome target, calibrate your scanner and solve your problem - but, of course, I can give no guarantee.

Edit: This service offers an Ektachrome target (K3) for slide scanners.

Edited by waldo_posth - 29 January 2021 at 11:57

Hi All,

I have discovered "Automatic Image Optimization and Color Contrast Removal" in SilverFast SE Plus. It can't correct the extreme image above, but it does a good job with modestly "impaired" images:







Edit: Yes, that's me in the pool

Edit #2: this was a Kodachrome slide

Edited by bms44974 - 30 January 2021 at 00:03