Locality pictures

Last week I found again some of my slide boxes; several 100 slides dated back end of 70ies up to around 1995.
As I was travelling a lot in those days I made many pics from localities, many of them are history already.

I was a young chap at those days with low money so I used cheap slides. Too bad they don`t have the best quality anymore; especially the colour changed terribly. When I add locality pics I see that many click on them so I assume they are interested to see them. On the other side I don`t want to add too bad pics. Its a border line ....

Where would you set that line?

Post them!

Even if the colour have faded, it might be the only picture ever taken?! It's better to have a poor picture than no pictures at all, specialy if it's lost localities. If someone can show up with a better it's easie to remove or replace the poor.

That is my opinion.

Peter

Chris,
post them .. even if they may not meet your own standard they can be very useful for others. And with some Photoshop filters/processings faded colours can be restored quite well in many cases .. if you want me to help to process them please let me know and send them to me (can give you an ftp-upload link) - i used to process old slides for publication quite some times.

Cheers
Roger

I agree, Christian. Perhaps, just as an example you have a picture of a collecting hot spot or type locality location, now truly inaccessible or built upon. That kind of slide, no matter the quality, needs to be documented. I also love to see spots where the chances of getting there are realtively nil.

A musical analogy. There are Pink Floyd concerts from the early days, just to use one of my favorite bands as an example, where only one recording exists. And that recording sounds like it was taped in a slaughterhouse. Still, it ought to be shared. Someone, maybe many "someones" will get mileage out of it.

I second Peter's opinion.

On a side note - I don't know how Photoshop savvy you are, but if you constantly used the same cheap brand of slides those days, the color deterioration might be kind of constant, too. If that is the case, you once spend some time in PS for color correction and once you are satisfied you may apply the same correction to all other slides - either by recording the steps as action or by pulling over the adjustment layers to the individual images.

But as Peter said - the historical value has priority over the pictorial quality.

Cheers

Harry

Thanks for the fast responses!

I use already PS to get better results. The problem is that only some colours tend to change. So I cannot add a colour to the whole pic but must be specific to parts of it - and thats absolutely time consuming.
Other slides have dirt or scratches on it; again others are almost colourless or pale yellow and lost ALL other colours.
Its a science for its own but challenging.
Maybe I change to black/white.

Chris,
i have some ready to use 3rd party filtersets for PS for different color alterations and the Polaroid Scratch and Dust remover plugin is lots better than the PS-own filters - if you´d like to try them you are welcome.

And yepp, it is a science of its own and trial and error is the game ;),

cheers
Roger

Christian Auer Wrote:
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> So I cannot add a colour to the whole pic but must
> be specific to parts of it

Chris, it does not work like that. It is far more complicated and mostly has to do with messing around with individual color channels. There have been bibles written on color correction and photo restauration - the best ones by Dan Margulis and Katrin Eisman.

Also, if you don't do this on a daily basis you have to start learning all over again after one year :).

Roger is right, the scratch and dust filter in PS leaves much to be desired. However, I have not yet come across any such filter or plug-in that does not at the same time also remove fine detail.

Some years ago I spent many days retouching about two dozen old photographs (partly more than 100 years old) of my ancestors. A challenge, right, but also fascinating and in the end rewarding, but such treasures are a different case than restoring 100's of slides which are probably even scanned with a flatbed scanner.

Eventually, it is your decision whether it is worth or not to invest so much time :).

Cheers

Harry



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/15/2010 06:58PM by Harald Schillhammer.