Re-cycling old colour slides

Littletank

Littletank

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Norman
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I am relatively new here and, if this topic has been dealt with in the past, then please excuse me for raising it again. There must be a very great number of old slides both personal and commercially produced, in drawers, cupboards and boxes which are just lying there suffering from deterioration of the colour producing chemicals and dyes and which could, in many cases, be processed to produce some new images. For a long time I have tried to make use of the old material I possess, not always very successfully and I would be interested to know if any other members have tried to use old slides, what they have tried and with what results. If it is considered that this topic is worth following up I will be very happy to post some examples of what I mean by re-cycling and I look forward to seeing the efforts of others with commentary where appropriate.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.
 
I seem to remember a thread like this a few moons ago, Norman (maybe it was you?). I've scanned all my old slides, but attempting to do so accurately* rather than as a base for further creative interpretation. But since we have folk here who sometimes process E6 slides in C41 chems, or either of those in black and white chems, or shoot with the film in the camera backwards etc, it seems reasonable to experiment. Mind you, I'm not speaking for the group (it is Film and Conventional after all), but I'm interested. Why not give us a shot at what you do?

* Whatever that means!
 
I think it isn't what you're doing, but have you seen this Petapixel article about someone restoring old prints? Not sure if it's relevant...
 
Hi Norman your post can apply to the digi and film forum as I'm sure someone will come along to say you can copy the slides with a camera (either one)...for me I regret penny pinching in the past and getting say Perutz instead of Kodachrome (estimated no colour fade for about 100 years), so 50 years on I do have some faded slides and all I do is use a film scanner and try to revive the colours in Photoshop.
 
Thank you Chris, for your response and for the link to the print restoration. I do not do anything special with old slides and I am hoping that there may be others who, like me, enjoy trying things out especially with old material. Before I post any images I will wait a day or so and see what turns up.

It seems to me, Loretta, that colours change even with Kodachrome unless the slides are stored under specified and closely controlled conditions. Some old, commercially produced slides in my collection have a most pronounced red cast and to try to recover the original colours is, in my opinion, not an option. However, it is often possible to minimise the cast and, provided that scanning is done with a good quality scanner some very satisfactory black and white images can be made. Furthermore, using available digital software, the scanned image can be cropped and processed as if it were a negative in an enlarger.
 
My memory of slide shows from the '70s and '80s is of very saturated reds anyway - maybe it's not that the old slides have developed a red cast, just that it's now more apparent when compared to Velvia transparencies?
 
I assure you, Nod, I mean a red cast. here is an example:-

33w86sj.jpg
 
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That's well beyond magenta!
 
I hate to think what my old ORWO transparencies look like now. They were bright yellow back from the lab. Kodachrome usually has a slight magenta but I have never seen anything as extreme as that, Norman.
 
Littletank said:
I assure you, Nod, I mean a red cast. here is an example:-

33w86sj.jpg
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Is that from Kodachrome? I've got quite a few boxes of Kodachrome, some my parents shot back in the 50's and none of them have degraded like that.
 
This slide is from a collection of old commercial slides that I bought because I wanted to see what could be done with such material. The cardboard slide holder shows that it was sold by a firm called Woodmansterne with whom I have been in contact. The original was shot in San Remo on the Italian Riviera and is printed on Elfincolor. I have not been able to find out anything about Elfincolor but assume it was a film produced especially for the copying of slides.

I have many other old commercial slides all showing this red cast of various amounts and I believe the red arises from the fact that the cyan layer in the emulsion tends to degrade. The only cast I have seen in my own Kodachrome 25 and Ektachrome slides has been a slight bluish tinge.
 
Woodmansterne slides used to be available to purchase from historic monuments, cathedrals etc where you were not permitted to use a camera so yes they will be slide duplicates. Ektachrome was known for being on the bluish side of the spectrum although I have never seen any Kodachromes with a blueish cast only magenta.
 
shreds said:
Woodmansterne slides used to be available to purchase from historic monuments, cathedrals etc where you were not permitted to use a camera so yes they will be slide duplicates. Ektachrome was known for being on the bluish side of the spectrum although I have never seen any Kodachromes with a blueish cast only magenta.
Click to expand...

I've certainly had troubles getting blue-ish casts with Kodachrome when I started, and apparently it's common, eg see this and this (pretty old stuff, maybe the software fixed it better since). I got better results with Silverfast, which had a special Kodachrome setting. This was before I knew anything about profiling scanners! The second reference is interesting:

There are a couple other issues besides the mentioned interactions between the Kodachrome dyes and the scanner filters and light source.

Because Kodachrome was designed for projection, it has an intentional blue bias to counteract the yellowness of tungsten projector bulbs. If you look at the characteristic curves of KC you can see how the R, G, and B curves are tilted with differing gammas, unlike Ektachrome or Velvia that have the curves aligned for a neutral gray scale.

The other issue is the high overall contrast, which compensates for the low viewing contrast that arises from the dark environment in which slides are projected.
Click to expand...
 
Whilst I prefer the b/w I suppose the actuality of the shot was originally something like this?

acspqv.jpg
 
Well my Kodachrome slides are up to 53 years old and just stored at room temp..the only ones that are not so good are the ones where I've cocked up the exposure, also some in dull conditions where Kodachrome is not at it's best...well that can be the same for any film.

This shot showing my son and father and my son is now 49 years old:-

 
Loretta, because I am neither competent nor confident to try to recover colour I prefer to convert to Black and white. It is easy enough to make the conversion to monochrome but is the result good enough to do the original photograph justice? I think that the end result of conversion should have the quality that you would expect of your own work. Slight colour casts are difficult enough to identify especially when considers the effects of ambient light and the brain. The brain seems to be trained to expect an item, which it considers to be white, to be white and automatically makes the necessary adjustments.

Chris, those two references are very interesting especially the second one, all is not as simple as, at first sight, it might seem to be.

Ian, I suppose I have a selfish motive in all of this. Many years ago, when I was an enthusiastic amateur photographer, I enjoyed the challenge involved in converting the latent image on a piece of film into an acceptable black and white representation on a piece of paper. As time progressed my darkroom went and eventually I reached the stage when I could no longer hold a camera or, indeed, go around shooting pictures. I tried table top with a digital camera but, somehow, the excitement had gone. It then occurred to me that with all the various applications available for the computer I could recover some of the old interest by scanning old materials and processing the results as I might have done in the darkroom with a negative, enlarger and so on. I'll continue to try to produce what I consider to be acceptable monochrome images from old material, be it my own or from other sources, which I will post from time to time and, as always, will welcome constructive criticism.
 
Littletank said:
I assure you, Nod, I mean a red cast. here is an example:-

33w86sj.jpg
Click to expand...


Sorry, had to rush out earlier so only had time to hit the like button!

That's one hell of a colour cast - much redder than I remember (probably Kodachrome) slides from many years ago.
 
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