need help in retouch slide scan

[bert de wolff]

i have a pro scan of an old halfsize 35 mm colour slide
it needs help badly, who can help / advise ?
thanks in advance
bert

[Panpan]

Hi Bert

There are only hints of her hair and of the pattern in the scarf. There must be even more detail hidden in the slide. You could maybe photograph the projected slide and combine exposures optimized for highlights and shadows.

Pierre

P.S: I've added a second (I hope better) version.

[Photo678]

panpan, no offense, but that doesn't look so good.

You overly smoothed the heck out of her face, she looks like pudding face or something.

contrast is a bit much.

anyway, heres my quick attempt

there is next to nothing in her hair in terms of detail...but as pan pan said, you are going to need two exposures, one for the shadows and one for the highlights and combine them

[Panpan]

Originally Posted by Photo678

panpan, no offense, but that doesn't look so good.

You overly smoothed the heck out of her face, she looks like pudding face or something.

contrast is a bit much.

Thank you for the feedback. I'm sorry you didn't like them. I thought I had done better with the second one.

Pierre

[adong]

Hi.bert de wolff

[philbach]

Well this required a lot of painting. I copied the layer in Screen mode and with a brush lightened around the eyes etc. One probably needs to spend a lot of time with this photo to restore it properly.

[bert de wolff]

hi PHTO678, PANPAN, ADONG and PHILBACH fthanks a lot for all your great contributions!
it's a difficult one this indeed. the only slight hair detail is in the blue channel but sofar i haven't been able to make it come out in a natural way.
however we'll keep on trying
thanks again for your help sofar

bert

[Caitlin]

Originally Posted by bert de wolff

i have a pro scan of an old halfsize 35 mm colour slide
it needs help badly,

Bert, what scanner are you using? I would expect a better image result from a slide.

[bert de wolff]

Originally Posted by Caitlin

Bert, what scanner are you using? I would expect a better image result from a slide.

hi caitlin
i had the scan done by a local pro
from the metadata i see it was done on a Nikon Coolscan V ED
remember it's a 25 year old colour slide in halfsize 35 mm format (forget the original format name, Olympus had these Pen EE models then)

rgds
bert

[Photo678]

ahhhh half frame camera...very old skool...

[leuallen]

Here is my effort.

1. Selective color adj layer, balanced mid gray point on collar to neutral. Face lookd bad.

2. On adj layer painted face with black brush to restore face to original. Too much. About half way would be closer to good skin tones. So Alt click on adj ayer mask to make it visible. Color selection of the blacks and fill selection with 50% gray. Now some of the color adjustment from the adj layer show through. Looks better, but still not there.

3. Another Selective color adj layer on top of stack. Adjust color for face, jacket and background will go off color. Copy mask from first adj. layer to new adj layer. Invert mask. background is restored but color of new adj layer remains.
Almost happy with color. Will fix localized tones latter.

4. Eyes look bad. Make 50% new layer for dodging and burning. Low opacity white brush to lighten up areas around eyes. Color really shifts badly on worked areas, don't worry about it now, can be fixed easily latter. Made layer set and put these layers in it. Made new merged layer from set, having only set visible, ctl-shft-alt-N-E (whew!).

5. Copied the new layer once more by dragging to new layer icon at bottom. Healing brush to clean up under eyes. Overdo it a little. It will look plastic and unnatural. When done, lower opacity and let original of copy layer underneath show through. About 44% looked good. Eyes look much better and more natural now.

6.? Don't remember but I think the eyes still looked to dark so I made another new merged copy layer of the top two layers and then another 50% dodge/burn layer. Painted with white to lighten eyes.

7. Merged last copy layer and D/B layer. Going to work on the local discolored areas. Set brush to color, 10%. Select a good, normal skin color, light mid tone that is near the area you want to correct. While in brush mode, hold down the Alt key and the color picker comes up. Bush over the discolored areas. Build up, the bad color will start to disappear and merge with your selected color. Do this with the various discolored areas, sample new for each area that is in a different color zone.

Took longer to write this than do the steps.

Larry

[Cassidy]

Larry looks very natural.

I thought I'd have a go at this, as my main bug was the missing hairline. Dont recall all that I did other than I created a new layer and wound the brightness and contrast right up to pick out the hairline and then slightly dodged around the background of it before overlaying with a very small opacity.

[roger_ele]

Hi, just thought I would throw this in because no one else has really followed this thought process ... I did not retouch the face as that was not the point of this thread ...

-new layer, inserted red channel and set to luminosity blend mode, flattened
-Control-Alt-~ to select highlights
-Control-Shift-I to invert selection
-Control-J to copy selcted shadows to new layer, set blend mode to screen
-Control-J a bunch of times to dup this layer to lighten hair
-Duped background layer and merged hair lightening layers with this dup, masked to just effect hair

Hope this helps,
Roger

[bert de wolff]

larry, cass and roger,

many thanks for the workflows of your different approaches, will put them to work on my original

many thanks again

bert