Re: Evolution of an image....help

Having fought with a variety of my own 'chemical RAW' images....

You're trying to drag a color image out of an emulsion that never captured the color accurately. Stick with the black & white - it's a very good image in that form.

The color in the original scan makes me suspect you were shooting K64. Lost all the color rendition in the shadow, which is why it shows up so uneven when you try to pull it out with post-processing. It's not in the positive so it's hard to pull out what isn't there....

Fading may also have eliminated the faint traces of it at the edges of the emulsion's dynamic range.

Don't give up on the 'bad' images, but you're got a vast experience with the limitations of whatever emulsion you were shooting at the time to know there might not be much image in the grain structure. My experience is, if it's potentially a good enough image, scan it at as high a resolution as possible so you can capture and 'oversample' of the film grain structure. (9600 dpi on a 35mm negative is memory intensive...) Oversampling gives you enough samples on the grain structure that you can partly recover some of the marginal color and detail that is in the background of many of these images.

But it's time intensive.

I have a very nice image from Mid Continent of Saginaw Timber #2 (attached) that I simply cannot pull into the state it should be. No amount of post-process will do it. The negative faded in such a way that I can't "force it". It had issues with being marginal in the shadows to begin with. Add in a bit of a red shift in the 'pink lady' granite ballast, an overcast and underexposed sky..... It goes to pot in color. What I've attached isn't true to the colors that ought to be there.

But it's got the contrast to be a really good B&W image.

Sometimes all that's left is a reminder of the memory.... Which is worth a lot. Keep scanning!

SRK

John West Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> One of the ways to avoid getting a reputation as a
> lousy photographer is to hide your bad pictures,
> of which I have many. But as time passes and
> winter boredom sets in it is tempting to pull out
> the rejects and see what you can do with one or
> two of them. So that led to my digging out this
> photo from the 1997 rotary run. The original
> slide looked like this.
>
> [attachment 60905 CTSoycumdarkglintscan.jpg]
>
> Way too blue, too dark, blown highlights, no warm
> glint color. Not great. Hmm...maybe I can do
> something with it in Photoshop. Which led to this
> result.
>
> [attachment 60906 CTSoycumdarkglint1100.jpg]
>
> And then a second attempt.
>
> [attachment 60907 CTSoycumdarkglint1102.jpg]
>
> Better but no banana. I wonder what it would look
> like in B&W. And maybe with a blue filter.
>
> [attachment 60908 CTSoycumdarkglint1100bw.jpg]
>
> Well, not sure if any of them deserve a banana but
> it was a fun effort. The "help" part in the title
> is looking for feedback as to whether any of them
> are worth saving, I get too involved to be
> objective.
>
> JBWX