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Hi all. My grandfather passed suddenly last fall; he was an avid photographer and left us with boxes and boxes of slides, negatives, prints, and more. My family and I would like to preserve and digitize most of it. We are down to get the finest ones processed professionally, but for the rest, I was looking for tips on doing it ourselves. Currently I'm using my family's Epson Perfection 4870 flatbed scanner, which also has a transparency unit and slide holder. It goes up to 4800dpi; for slides we've been scanning at 1800dpi, and much less for prints. I'm archiving them in .png because it's lossless. I am using GIMP for my photo editing. I don't have much experience retouching photos apart from running white balance and the occasional stamp tool to take out a scratch or something. For cleaning, I've been lightly using a can of duster on the slides, and used a microfiber cloth on the scanner bed. Here are some examples. What can I do to correct the fading on some of these photos?  mom circa 1955  grandpa in front of mystery shack  yee haw  grandma noooo don't feed the bears Thanks, all.
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Feb 6, 2020 11:40
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The faded look is because the whites aren't white and the blacks aren't black. The tool to use for this is curves. I use Photoshop, not GIMP, but it works the same way in GIMP. Here's what it looks like if you set the white and black points so that things in the picture that are white are near the top end of the range (but not clipped) and so that things that are black are near the bottom end of the range (I decided the black border could be clipped because it's not part of the photo):  Better, but kinda magenta, right? That's because the colors in slide film age at different rates, which throws the color balance off. Here's what it looks like if you do what I described above, but for each RGB channel separately: 
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Feb 6, 2020 18:24
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Wow, great, thank you! Should I allow any clipping on the RGB values to compensate for fading?
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Feb 6, 2020 23:00
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weed cat posted:Wow, great, thank you! Should I allow any clipping on the RGB values to compensate for fading? In my examples above, I brought in the white/black points until just before they clip (with the exception of the black frame, which I did clip). If you clip the histogram, you're losing detail. If white/black points for each color channel isn't enough to make it look right, you'd need additional curves points in between white/black.
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Feb 7, 2020 06:21
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