FIxing colours on professional slides

[muguk]

Last year I bought 4 x boxes of slides from a car boot with the intention of scanning them all in and preserving them. The main reason, other than to add another feather in my cap, was that all of the slides were from before I was born (1970) and they obviously told many a tale of the previous owner's travelling throughout Europe 40+ years ago.

 

A lot of the slides are from personal photos and are easy to scan in using the slide-scanner I bought from 7DayShop. The problematic ones are those that were bought from the places the owner had visited - just as you'd buy a postcard, in the old days you'd buy commercial slides from the place to save taking a dodgy photo (I guess).

 

These scans are all appearing in an inverse with a heavy tint of red (or yellow, or green) and, as I'm new to this, I'm not quite sure which options in Paint.NET (or which plugin to use) to get them back to normal. The detail is there, but the colours are not.

 

I've shrunk one of the scans to 10% of the original size which is appearing in the full-on-red, then added a second copy of it using the Auto Level option under Adjustments.

 

Any help would be appreciated as I'm only as far as a third of the way through the first box (aka 'Austria', 1967 and 1970) and there's a lot more commercial ones to scan and fix :-)

[Pixey]

Hi Muguk and Welcome to the forum.

 

I had a play with your pinkish photo and came up with this:

 

 

 

I first played with the Hue and Saturation in the Adjustments drop down and then went on to use this process:

 

http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/25221-how-to-make-the-colors-more-intense/

 

Hope this was of help

 

 

[muguk]

I will give this a go. Many thanks!

 

I only really use Paint.NET for messing about with screenshots of applications or websites for my work, so I have never used the "proper" side of it

[dipstick]

You can also experiment using Curves+. Switch to RGB mode, then deselect Green and Blue to adjust just the Red Channel....

 

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Returning these to full color is going to be very time consuming. As you've rightly said "The detail is there, but the colours are not."

If you just want to 'normalize' these so they don't appear so garish, try Adjustments > Sepia ( Ctrl  + Shift + E). It's a fast and easy adjustment (there is no dialog or settings to adjust).

 

[muguk]

For these commercially produced ones, I would assume that (back in the late 60s/early 70s) there was a way to display them in colour. There are a few brands in the box and

 

• 'Uber Color' appear as predominantly red are branded.
• unbranded ones with a yellow slide border appear as a negative of the 'Uber Color' red.
• 'Austria Color' ones appear as a negative sepia.

I'm guessing that they were supposed to be shown against a white wall and would appear in colour, regardless of the brand/predominant colour used?

 

I can rescan the images from the commercial slides via the slide scanner in three types: Colour negative, Colour positive and black & white negative. Should I be using the Colour Negative and Positive options to create a working image that can be merged via the layer option linked in the first reply?

 

Apologies for my cluelessness in this, but when the pictures are up on whatever website I host them at, I'm hoping it will be worth the effort due to the historical side

[Eli]

Hello Mr muguk,

 

You can also use the Laplacian effect to make some udjustments :

[muguk]

Many thanks. I've downloaded the plugin, plus the author's Image Analyzer tool as well.