This is a photo taken of a slide. It's shot using a Nikon D70 with a Sigma macro lense. The slide is from 1951 when my Dad served in Korea, in combat as a US Marine. I shot hundreds of similar slides, so I'd really appreciate any help with restoring this photo. I use Photoshop CS2. Thanks.

Vi

vadkins,

there's not a lot of content here. i mean, it's a lot of sky and a lot of ground, but not much of anything else. so, my question is, are you willing to crop some of that out or do you want to do a straight restore (losing nothing)?

the central focus seems to be on that tank(?), truck(?) or whatever that brown/black thing is in the middle.

at any rate, i'd start with a color balance but turn 'preserve luminance' off and brighten as you balance. there's actually very little dirt/specs, especially considering the age of the picture, but there is some. you can clone or smudge this out. for the dark corners in the sky, i added a blank layer and filled it with one of the lighter blues of the sky and then added a mask and adjusted the mask until i had the corners lightened up a bit.

Kraellin,

are you willing to crop some of that out or do you want to do a straight restore (losing nothing)?

Sure, cropping is OK, especially of the sky-there is way too much sky, you're right about that.

i'd start with a color balance but turn 'preserve luminance' off and brighten as you balance. there's actually very little dirt/specs, especially considering the age of the picture, but there is some. you can clone or smudge this out. for the dark corners in the sky, i added a blank layer and filled it with one of the lighter blues of the sky and then added a mask and adjusted the mask until i had the corners lightened up a bit.

Great advice, thank you. It sounds like you made the corrections that you suggest in your post, but I didn't see an attachment to your post? Maybe I missed it?

Thanks much for your help.

Vi

vadkins,

yes, i did make the corrections i mentioned and no, i didnt forget to post it. i dont always.

one thing i did that i didnt mention was, you can smooth up your mask by gausian blurrring it. i airbrushed the mask to start and then did the blur and just kept adjusting it that way till i had what i wanted. remember, it's just a mask so you're not altering the picture itself. makes it easier.

i think photoshop has some other ways of doing it as well but i dont use photoshop. so, maybe one of the ps users will post something as well.

i looked at the image fresh today and decided i still didnt have the upper corners right. so, i used the smudge brush to move some lighter colors into the corners. so, now i'll post the image. i didnt crop it.

Wow, that sky looks really great! Thanks again!

Can you explain a little more how you did the color balance? Is that the same as finding the shadow and highlight in Photoshop using curves?

Vi

hi vadkins,

thanks :)

you could use curves. i used the 'color balance' filter in psp. i'm fairly sure photoshop has this also. the 'color balance' wasnt for fixing the corners of the sky, however. i applied it to the entire image to bring the brightness up a bit and to adjust the colors against each other.

fixing the sky corners was the part about masking. i made a blank layer above the other stuff and filled it with a color i had picked from the existing sky. i then added a 'show all' mask to this. you then only have to adjust the mask to allow or disallow the filled layer showing through to the other layers. painting with black on the mask will prevent things from showing, while painting with white allows the fill layer to show. shades inbetween are gradations of this. it's like putting a template over something you want to paint. the mask allows or disallows your 'paint' (in this case the fill layer) to show through over your other original layer.

i used an airbrush to 'paint' the mask different shades of white to black and then did a guasian blur of the mask itself to smooth the mask, not the fill layer. i never touched the fill layer.

when i picked it up today, i wasnt real ok with the masking and fill stuff, so i did what is called a 'copy merge', which basically makes a copy on your clipboard of your current overall effect, and then did a 'paste to new layer' on the copy merge. i then added another blank layer over that and picked the smudge brush set to 'use all layers', which borrows the data from your underlying layers and allows you to have the results of your smudging on the blank layer rather than the original. the smudging was enough that i was then happy with the sky.

If you have many 35 mm slides you may be better off using a scanner like the Epson 4870 which can scan at up to 4800 dpi. It comes with a slide adapter and also "digital ice" which is Epsons dust remover. I was surprised at the quality I got scanning slides and the results were better than an older slide scanner I had.

As far as the picture one wonders what the true color of that cold winterey scene was. I balanced the color by using levels and the white eyedropper on some white snow. To remove specks I copied the layer to another layer and used Lighten blending mode. Then I used a median filter on that layer at about 3. That korean war was a nasty one and unheralded as well. Good luck with your preservation.