Dark Slides

Ive got an advice question..


I have a number of slides which are very dark in nature, when shining a higher density light at them I can clearly see the detail, though using a regular scanner to scan them in I get a low density dark image.

Anyone any ideas how I can either improve the density of the light in the scanner, or a reccomended better scanner ?

 

Slides in my experience seem to appear underexposed when using a Auto DX camera so I always used to shoot with compensating by 1 to 2 stops. The first question had to be are you using a flatbed scanner or a dedicated slide scanner? Flatbeds will produce a reasonable image but a slide scanner will give an image of approx 3600dpi and a file size of approx 30Mb. generally these can then be enhanced using a good photo editor.

 

no sure how dark your slides are but we are presently scanning around 80,000 slides through automatic magazines, sets 50 at a time up while we go for a pint, we then isonlate the darker one and can enhance them all at once using ADCsee, any particular darl ones are photoshopped individually, it appears to be working well, we are event getting through some particulaly bad ones from the 50s and 60s.

 

I thought that unless the detail was present on the slide that they were basically of no use.

I suffered from the opposite end of the spectrum with several hundred, mostly aviation, slides which are over exposed
having been taken with a Zenith E and no handheld light meter.

I have been very tempted to throw them away but now i'm in two minds as to whether they could be rescued with good software..

 

I had the same problems, but with B&W prints. Some of them were really evil. I just put it down to prints of darkness.








Sorry!

 

There is of course a lot more latitude with print film than there is with a slide emulsion.

 

Playing around with the settings ,you should be able to alter brightness & contrast . Alter them first to get the best you can and then load into photoshop (or similar) for further editing.

 

......

 

Some very useful and interesting points there.

However, i would beg to differ about using a flatbed scanner.

Canon ceased production of their film/slide scanners stating that there range of high end flatbeds
produced equally good results, which they do.

And, of course, not everyone is fortunate enought to have the likes of CS3 to call on.

 

Utter rubbish! I've seen some of the results from top-end Canon flatbeds and, good though these may be, they don't even approach the quality that consistently comes from the Nikon LS-50!

I suspect that even Canon give away free with their scanner products a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is a cut down version of CS3, but which does contain very nearly everything that you are ever likely to need.

 

Deleted..

 

Thanks for the advice, I'll scan one in and show the result, the detail is within the image (if you shine bright light you can clearly see it), but one the scanner.. i tend to get the sky and an outline.

I am using a Prime Film 3650 Slide Scanner, scanning original slides.

 

I had to neglect this for sometime (busy! etc).

Here's an example of a "dark slide" it didnt scan to well, but when I shine a torch at the slide, it is clear there is umpteen more detail possible (i.e. I can clearly see the wheel spokes etc).. I guess I need some kind of high intensity scanner ?

I havent tried any software on it yet, I seem to think the scan could go a lot better before I get to the software part.

Any Suggestions / reccomendations ? (I know there's dust on the slide, I figure thats the easy part).

[attachment=0:2lj2v0pk]_46203001192-01.JPG[/attachment:2lj2v0pk]

 

Best suggestion I can give you is find a better scanner! Sorry.
The problem you are up against here is that you just don't have enough shadow detail in the image to make it possible to adjust the image to make it look good. It may well be that there's not enough detail in the slide itself but without seeing it, can't tell.
It is possible to improve the image in Photoshop or something similar with nothing more than an increase in brightness and contrast; brightness to see detail in the shadows and contrast to get as a good a black as possible. However, if you do this you will also enhance grain and bring out any artefacts in your scan. Your scan shows vertical scanning stripes - that's common with cheaper scanners and by cheaper I mean sub-£500.
To do these justice you would need to find someone to let you use a professional film scanner which will be able to record the brightness range that you need but, whatever you do, they will never be really good.
And no, sorry, I don't have access to a £15000 drum scanner. 10 years ago, yes, but not now.
I hope you won't mind but I've had a little play in Photoshop with the image you posted...[attachment=0:1b5x2bhx]_46203001192-01.JPG[/attachment:1b5x2bhx]

 

As blackfive has said jpg artefacts in the shadows are a problem with that example slide you posted. You could try scanning it as a tiff file (or bmp if your scanner software doesn't support tiffs) as this has little or no compression and hopefully will allow what detail there is in the shadows to be recovered by 'brightening'.

Below is a slide that was very dark and had a very prominent blue colour cast. It was possible to improve it by using the colour balance, curves, brightness/contrast tools etc. in Paint Shop Pro. It was scanned using an Epson Perfection 4180 scanner.

 

Wow that was very encouraging ! I'll give this go !

 

I'm assuming that the pic has been reduced in size for posting ?

If not you need to scan at a higher scale to get something that can be played around with in photoshop

I tried playing around with it but it is too highly pixilated.