Image Restoration

My scanner is an Epson V800. I tend to scan negatives and transparencies at 2400 dpi and I don’t use either the dust removal  or the DIGITAL ICE technology settings. I did when I first started scanning and I got mixed results. Mostly what would happen is that a nostril or the pupil of an eye would be blurred out. This was really frustrating. After a couple of months of trial and error, I gave it up. I do all of my clean up work after scanning.

Much of what I have collected is from the 1960s, so the condition of the negatives is not always the best.  35mm negatives are generally the worst and it may be due to the cheaper materials. Because they are used commercially, they were not meant to last. Some people who get started in collecting negatives are put off by this and end up getting out of the collecting.

The picture below shows the negative without any post processing. This image has a resolution of 600 dpi. The original was scanned at 2400 dpi but scaled it down for this post.

The following picture shows the negative after post processing. I don’t have any programming algorithms to help me with this step. It is all done by hand using Photoshop CS4 (because I am too cheap to use their CC software). This took me about 15 – 20 minutes to process because of how much dust and scratches there were, but most images will take me less than 5 minutes.

 

Color is a little bit harder to work with. In many cases, especially with commercially sold slides like Latent Image, Talking Pictures or Slide King, there will be a significant amount of red shift. This is where the transparency loses some of its blue and green components and the final scan is red dominant.

Much of this can be compensated with Levels and Curves adjustments in Photoshop. This took me only a couple of minutes. It is not perfect, but it is a pretty good start and it shows that a little bit of tweaking of the color channels goes a long way.

Fortunately, most of my transparencies and color negatives don’t have this problem. The bigger problem I have is with dust and scratches as shown in the figure below.

As with the black and white negatives, much of the work is done by figuring out which approach is the best for dealing with the blemishes. In some cases, I will use the Healing Brush or Patch tool; in others I will use Gaussian Blur. This took me about 30 minutes to correct. Most color images will take about 10 minutes because color is less forgiving than black and white.