# Treating Scanned slides



## sargan (Aug 4, 2015)

I have an under way project for my parents - scanning in family 35mm slide collection.  (over 600 so far  :()   Ultimately will be put onto DVD for them.

The issue is the slides are between 40 and 50 yrs old .... and of mixed stock .... some have emulsion breakdown with large black dots, and almost spiders web coming out from the dots.
Many have also for past 1o years many have been keep in loft ... so 40 degrees in Summer & below freezing in Winter - not ideal.

I have followed the best practise of blowing off dust with compressed air, then cleaning each slide with PEC-12 & PEC-Pads.
Then I scan in a Dimage slide scanner to 24 bit TIFF images (around 20 MB in size)  sRGB, sampled 4 times, and then manually try & adjust as best as possible in LR 5.7

Agfa slides are very bad ... Kodak & Ilford are much better ......... but many of the older ones (~50) are very red in colour which is demonstrated pretty well here: http://www.scantips.com/color.html

Unfortunately no tool tips for LR.

Can anybody suggest any tips or sequence for such slides.


Typically it's these very old ones have family members that are no longer living and of most interest to my parents.

(edit)  I purchased a copy of Vuescan scanning software for the job ... as this allows scanner support in W7 64 bit.
Once finished in LR they will be resized prior to turning into a video.

I have loaded one such TIFF file here as sample : http://www.4shared.com/photo/xhBkwXV_ba/Ilford-plastic-0007.html


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## Replytoken (Aug 4, 2015)

Kodak's ROC software/plug-in used to be bundled with many scanners, but I do not know if it is still available and if it works in a 64-bit environment.  That would have helped on the front end.  I cannot recall if Vuescan has any correction routines or not.  Ideally, it would be best to attempt to handle these issues with dedicated software, but lacking that, you may be able to batch the slides together and try to sample and find a generic correction that corrects that particular emulsion.  Many emulsions often "drift" in a consistent manner, so one correction may work reasonably well for a batch.

Good luck,

--Ken


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## sargan (Aug 4, 2015)

The plug in is available for Photoshop ... but only in 32bit   -  nothing listed for Lightroom.

Its such a pity that LR does not have the ability to set Black & White points ... always found that so useful in PS


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## Hoggy (Aug 8, 2015)

sargan said:


> Its such a pity that LR does not have the ability to set Black & White points ... always found that so useful in PS



The "Whites" and "Blacks" sliders in the Basic panel does exactly that.


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## sargan (Aug 8, 2015)

Hoggy said:


> The "Whites" and "Blacks" sliders in the Basic panel does exactly that.



Not quite ... there is no eye dropper to 'pick' a black point.
I am aware of how to user the sliders along with 'alt' key, but this is not the same as an eye dropper tool. 

I would have thought that there might have been 'add on' tools for LR but only see templates .. maybe it's not easy to produce add-ons.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 8, 2015)

Hoggy said:


> The "Whites" and "Blacks" sliders in the Basic panel does exactly that.



No, they don't. There is a long discussion going on at 'Dpreview' about the very same subject. Setting the black point and the white point in Photoshop will not only push the darkest pixels to zero or the brightest ones to 255, it will also neutralize them. Using 'Whites' and 'Blacks' in Lightroom will only push the pixels towards zero or 255. Of course you can continue to move the sliders so that all channels have clipped, but that is not the same.


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## Dale Strumpell (Aug 8, 2015)

I have Vuescan and Silverfast software. Silverfast has the best color correction and the best dust/scratch/hair removal I have found, although I don't think anything can fix the slides faded to red. Silverfast has presets for many types of color negatives which gives far superior results to Vuescan. They offer a demo to try. Available in various priced versions, maybe the cheapest one is all you need.


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## sargan (Aug 8, 2015)

Dale Strumpell said:


> I have Vuescan and Silverfast software. Silverfast has the best color correction and the best dust/scratch/hair removal I have found.



Can you tell me more ... ? Never heard of this.
Do you use instead of LR or before you use LR?

What does it cost?


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 8, 2015)

Silverfast is scanning software. Rather expensive (if you have a high quality scanner).


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## sargan (Aug 8, 2015)

JohanElzenga said:


> Silverfast is scanning software. Rather expensive (if you have a high quality scanner).




Ok .. I'll rule  that out ... bought Vuescan so don't want t invest in another scanner package.
Anybody know of any add on for LR or  maybe I'll move to gimp instead.  (Not by choice) but finding LR not helping much on colour correction.


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## Replytoken (Aug 9, 2015)

Read the last post about Colorperfect in this thread: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3165107 .  Perhaps it can be fit into your workflow?

--Ken


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## sargan (Aug 9, 2015)

Replytoken said:


> Read the last post about Colorperfect in this thread: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3165107 .  Perhaps it can be fit into your workflow?
> 
> --Ken



It looks good - but needs Photoshop (*or Elements) and I can't justify an investment having recently bought LR

'maybe' I could look at using it with GIMP that way only cost of colour perfect.

However - still interested to know of any LR solution .... templates/workflows   as that would be preference


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## Replytoken (Aug 9, 2015)

Did you have any luck at all correcting the slides with Vuescan?

--Ken


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## sargan (Aug 9, 2015)

With 600 slides to do ... and reading that Vuescan adjustments are too heavy handed ... I just went for plain scans.
Supposedly you can reload all scanned images back in and adjust as necessary without physically re-scanning ... but assumed a dedicated piece of image adjustment software specialised for teh task is going to be better than what is built in Vue-Scan.

I only bought VueScan to get W7 64 bit support for the scanner.


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## Hoggy (Aug 10, 2015)

JohanElzenga said:


> No, they don't. There is a long discussion going on at 'Dpreview' about the very same subject. Setting the black point and the white point in Photoshop will not only push the darkest pixels to zero or the brightest ones to 255, it will also neutralize them. Using 'Whites' and 'Blacks' in Lightroom will only push the pixels towards zero or 255. Of course you can continue to move the sliders so that all channels have clipped, but that is not the same.



Sorry, I don't mean to thread-jack...  But where can I find out more info about these differences?  Cause I always thought they were the same.  ...  I tried looking for that thread at DPreview, but couldn't find it.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 10, 2015)

The difference is that setting the black (or white) point in Curves, will push the endpoints of all three channels to black (by changing the three curves individually). By using 'Blacks' in Lightroom you can push one channel end point to black, but if you want all channels to become black, you have to keep going further (clipping two channels) until the last channel has reached the black point too. That's because you cannot manipulate individual channels with the 'Blacks' slider.

Here's the thread at Dpreview: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3883257


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