(no subject)

[ellarien]

Long, long ago, when my camera was a cheap 35mm that barely justified being called a point-and-shoot, my mother and I used to go to the Lake District round about this time of year, when the schools had gone back and it was relatively quiet and relatively inexpensive and the weather was still decent at least sometimes.

A decade or so later, I got my first scanner, and laboriously scanned the prints and tried to make them look decent using Adobe Photodeluxe. Between the bad camera and the often poor lighting, it was an uphill struggle. To deal with the vignetting, I had to apply a filter by hand, and I went to all kind of lengths fiddling with the contrast in different areas.

Tonight, I went back to one of the original scans and played with it for five minutes in Photoshop Elements 5. They have a special tool for fixing vignetting, and the "healing brush" works much better for getting rid of dust and smudges than what I used to do with the dust-removal tool in the old program.

The results are below the cut; the new one isn't perfect, but it does look promising.

	Grasmere 1 Old photo, processed for about 5 min in PhotoShop Elements 5
	Grasmere 2 Same photo, laboriously processed in Adobe PhotoDeluxe circa 2000.

Grasmere 3 Raw scan, just cropped to the photo edges

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

That's pretty amazing.

[ellarien]

Thanks!

I needed something tonight to remind me that progress can be a good thing.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

That's great! The latest version is much improved, even with the minimal processing time.

I have hundreds of 35mm colour slides to scan and my efforts with an old version of PaintShop Pro were disappointing. But as you say, things have moved on and I think PhotoShop Elements will cope better.

[ellarien]

I even have hopes of being able to salvage my 1991 Chile photos (scratched down the middle of the film) now!

Do you have a slide scanner? My father left us with with a cupboard full of slides, and I'd really like to transfer them to electronic form, but last time I looked real slide scanners were expensive, and I wouldn't expect them to get much cheaper.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I paid about £90 for the little slide scanner. I'm just hoping I can make it perform as well as some of the examples on the web because the better ones cost something like £2000, which is way beyond what I want to spend.