I have a few slides from this day at the beach, that all have this same form of spotted pattern/deterioration. I have never seen anything similar to it before. Does anyone have a clue what it may be?

The slides in all other respects were in quite good condition - but they were stored in very poor conditions (very damp) with other slides many of which were exibiting bad mould, so could this be a strange form of mould damage?

I could not get Neat Image to remove all of the spotting effect. My current version (attachment 3) is sharpened, then Neat Image to the max, and a gaussian blur on the sky which was the worst effected.

Does anyone have other suggestions how to reduce the damage?

thanks! :classic:

hi Caitlin, I tried duplicating the layer, set blend mode to Darken, then blur using Gaussian Blur, radius 1.1 pix.

This reduces the effect on the original quite a bit, but causes some lack of detail in the detail areas, so I'd mask it, and use it just for the sky.

The picture I'm posting has not been masked, or touched in any way other than how I've described.

There are some jpeg artifacts because I had to compress quite a lot.

I don't know what the texture is but it didn't go away easily. I thought I would try an experiment. Sort of a reverse sharpen.

I copied the layer; Ran the High pass filter on the copied layer with a radius of 3 pixels. Set the blending mode of the layer to overlay. This as expected sharpened the image. I then inverted the filtered layer which blurred it some and decreased some of the texture. I decreased the opacity to about 65% and there was some improvement.

This method may be of some value so I thought I would pass it on.

Hi Caitlin,

no idea whatsoever about the cause of the strange texture ....

Like Gary and Phil I had some trouble in minimizing it without losing too many details .... I even tried FFT, but it didn't work for me ... :o:

I worked on the 'detail' image as the texture was more visible there ....

I got my best results by using the D&S Filter .... The trick with this Filter in to increase the Radius until the 'problem' has disappeared, then, slowly increase the Treshold until you get to the point where you have most of your 'natural' texture back but the 'problem' hasn't appeared yet .....

The D&S values I used here are:
Radius=7
Treshold=3

I added a 'Hide All' Layer mask to the D&S layer and, changing the brush opacity as necessary to not erase too many details, I painted white on the problem areas ....

I used the Curves to lift the shadows a bit, added an Overlay Noise Layer (reducing Opacity until I was satisfied, Neat Image to 'clean up' a bit and, finally a light sharpening.

Hope this helps .....

As always, a superb result Flora - I will have another go at this tomorrow!

That's not a texture! It's microscopic amoeba I saw in Science class back in highschool.

That's not a texture! It's microscopic amoeba I saw in Science class back in highschool.Break it to me now - is it fatal! ? :dizzy: Actually I think it has to be some weird mould damage (Which of course CAN be quite dangerous - but I have had no ill effects so far .)

It kind of looks like "reticulation" (hope I have that spelled right), which is a condition caused by improper film processing. Usually caused by going from one bath to another that is way to hot or way to cold.

If that condition is only on a few slides, that look like they may be from the same roll, then we could be on to something, if not, struck out again!!

Mike

Mike - you may be right. I have only noticed this pattern on a few slides, all from the same 'shoot'.

In which case give me this improper processing any day! They have kept their colour, and avoided serious mold damage better than any other of this sorry mess of 1000's of moldy slides....

Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't totally mean to make fun of your picture. I like what has been done so far and hope you restore it to your satisfaction. Good luck!