# Scanning colour slides - fixing faded colours.



## Merlyn (Apr 29, 2013)

Hi,

I have embarked on a project to scan in my colour slides using a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED with Vuescan scanning software.  Some slides are over 40 years old and either faded or more likely the colours have changed significantly.  My workflow is to do a batch scan into DNG with Vuescan with no treatments (so basically a Raw scan plus IR channel).  Then "rescan" from disk into DNG, with scanning related treatments applied as a separate step ie: using the clean options, grain reduction, specifying film type, and possibly using the colour restore options (these latter ones are not graduated but either ON or OFF).  I then import the DNG into LR4.4 and do the LR type stuff.  

My question is: are there any plug ins or other options for me to use with LR (or vuescan) that allow me to recover colours in the slide scans.  The Nikon software that came with the scanner had Digital ROC which is a much better "colour restorer" than the Vuescan sledgehammer ON/OFF option but Vuescan is so much superior from a workflow perspective (which I have described above).  

One other option might be to fiddle with the RGB curve in LR on a channel by channel basis and then create a bunch of presets for different degrees of fading/aging (has anyone done this) - but this would require me to have a good understanding of how the colours transform over time for different film types. 

Any thoughts / suggestions would be much appreciated.  Thanks


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## Denis de Gannes (Apr 30, 2013)

Have you checked if LR will import DNG files created by Vuescan? I am not an expert with Vuescan but I have used it in the past. LR Develop forte is to process raw files for Digital Cameras, they do not provide specific support for Scanned files. My advice would be to use Vuescan's tools to produce the best scanned results and save as tiff then import into Lightroom.


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## Merlyn (Apr 30, 2013)

Denis de Gannes said:


> Have you checked if LR will import DNG files created by Vuescan? I am not an expert with Vuescan but I have used it in the past. LR Develop forte is to process raw files for Digital Cameras, they do not provide specific support for Scanned files. My advice would be to use Vuescan's tools to produce the best scanned results and save as tiff then import into Lightroom.



Thanks for your comments.  There is no trouble with importing Vuescan DNG scans into LR .  And there are no issues using the full range of LR tools on the Vuescan DNG output - as one would expect (from DNG).  My question was about tools or techniques to restore faded colours in scanned slides, preferably (but not necessarily) within the workflow I described; ie in the Vuescan / Lightroom space.


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## Bruce J (Apr 30, 2013)

I have had some success using the same process you are using.  Scan slides (and negatives) with Vuescan, proces for scratches, etc., and then import into LR.  I have used tiff as the file format, but I don't think that's important.  The success I have had at restoring color is running Digital ROC as a plug-in to Photoshop.  I made a droplet in PS to run an action that runs ROC, and then export to the droplet from LR.  My old version of ROC only runs in 32-bit PS, which I keep on the machine just for that purpose.  When I get back in LR after running the droplet, I have two copies of each image.  Most of them are greatly improved by ROC.  For those, I delete the original and tweak in LR.  For the others, I delete the ROC version and proceed manually in LR.  Hope that's useful to you.


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## Merlyn (May 1, 2013)

Bruce J said:


> I have had some success using the same process you are using.  Scan slides (and negatives) with Vuescan, proces for scratches, etc., and then import into LR.  I have used tiff as the file format, but I don't think that's important.  The success I have had at restoring color is running Digital ROC as a plug-in to Photoshop.  I made a droplet in PS to run an action that runs ROC, and then export to the droplet from LR.  My old version of ROC only runs in 32-bit PS, which I keep on the machine just for that purpose.  When I get back in LR after running the droplet, I have two copies of each image.  Most of them are greatly improved by ROC.  For those, I delete the original and tweak in LR.  For the others, I delete the ROC version and proceed manually in LR.  Hope that's useful to you.



Hi, thanks for the info Bruce.  After your post I have done a bit of research and it seems like Digital ROC is the way to go (it was in fact the product that came with the Nikon software but the workflow with the nikon software is no where near as good as the Vuescan workflow so I am really avoiding trying to use it.)  

I have not really used Photoshop - still trying to get on top of LR.  I do have CS5 on my computer but its 64 bit.  While at a basic level (actually at an assembler language level) I understand the difference between 32 bit and 64 bit - I don't at the application level.  so...now I have some more questions I'm afraid.
1. Do I need to have an older version of Photoshop, or 
2  Can I use my 64bit version (CS5) with the digital ROC running in some 32 bit address space (how do I do that) or 
3. do I have to re-instal my CS5 as a 32 bit app (not sure how to do that either

I don't know what a "droplet" is but I should be able to find that out with a bit of reading.

Ray


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## Bruce J (May 1, 2013)

Merlyn said:


> Hi, thanks for the info Bruce.  After your post I have done a bit of research and it seems like Digital ROC is the way to go (it was in fact the product that came with the Nikon software but the workflow with the nikon software is no where near as good as the Vuescan workflow so I am really avoiding trying to use it.)
> 
> I have not really used Photoshop - still trying to get on top of LR.  I do have CS5 on my computer but its 64 bit.  While at a basic level (actually at an assembler language level) I understand the difference between 32 bit and 64 bit - I don't at the application level.  so...now I have some more questions I'm afraid.
> 1. Do I need to have an older version of Photoshop, or
> ...


Ray, my computer is down at the moment, so I'm going to answer from memory (always a hazardous undertaking). 
1.  You shouldn't need an older version of PS, but may need the 32-bit version. 
2.  I don't know whether your version of digital ROC will run under 64-bit or not. Try installing it and see if it runs. My older version gave an error message when I tried to run it in 64-bit, but ran fine in the 32-bit version. There's no way that I know to run in 32-bit address space from the 64-bit version. 
3.  You can install both the 64-bit version and the 32-bit versions on the same computer and alternate between them, as necessary. They use the same license code. So, just download the 32-bit version and install it alongside the 64-bit version. 
4.  A 'droplet' is a PS action that lives on the desktop. I created an action in PS that opens the incoming file in digital ROC and then pauses for me to fiddle with the settings. When I finish, it saves the file back to LR. After you create the action, there's a PS command to save it as a droplet. Then, in LR, you can export a set of images to the droplet, which will open each one in the PS plugin and save the resulting image in LR next to your original. Somewhere on this forum, Victoria has a much better description of creating and using droplets. 

My advice is to try to work this out stepwise; first get the plugin working in PS, then create an action that will call up the plugin and save the image. When that works, try making a droplet. When you get the droplet working, then try running the droplet from LR. Much easier than trying to swallow the whole process at once. Let us know if you get stuck along the way. Cheers,


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## Merlyn (May 2, 2013)

Bruce J said:


> Ray, my computer is down at the moment, so I'm going to answer from memory (always a hazardous undertaking).
> 1.  You shouldn't need an older version of PS, but may need the 32-bit version.
> 2.  I don't know whether your version of digital ROC will run under 64-bit or not. Try installing it and see if it runs. My older version gave an error message when I tried to run it in 64-bit, but ran fine in the 32-bit version. There's no way that I know to run in 32-bit address space from the 64-bit version.
> 3.  You can install both the 64-bit version and the 32-bit versions on the same computer and alternate between them, as necessary. They use the same license code. So, just download the 32-bit version and install it alongside the 64-bit version.
> ...



Bruce, 
Many thanks for your reply - it's pretty easy to follow so I should be able to get somewhere (hopefully some others will also find it useful).  I have a set of tutorials for photoshop - I will probably get stuck into those first so I'm not flying blind.  Again, thank you, much appreciated.
Ray


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