Underexposed scanned slides

[sandkat]

Looking for a quick fix or best procedure to compensate for underexposed 35 slides scanned to digital. When brought on screen in Elements 2 look grainy, and washed out with sparkly flecks. Tried playing with brightness and saturation and although I get them to look better, the overall sparkly graininess remains. Any tips on best way to go about to salvage will be appreciated. Thanks KK

PS: included a slide that I brightened up and increased saturation on. This slide was originally very dark and was taken in evening lite with inadequate flash.

[bart_hickman]

Hi KK,

A link to an example or a crop from a representative section of an image would be useful.

Are you sure the slides themselves aren't grainy? I've noticed many of my negatives that I've scanned in were pretty grainy although they were just vanilla costco-bought film (Kodak Gold 100).

Bart

[Kraellin]

generally speaking, when you've got an image that was shot in too little light and you lighten it up, you get 'noise'. that seems to be the case here. you've also got a bit of a color balance issue, which also happens from low light shots, often getting too much red.

to correct for this, i duplicated the original layer.

i next ran 'smart fix', which gives me a general re-adjustment of color and luminosity.

duplicate that layer.

i then ran 'digital camera noise removal' to clean up the noise. i had to be fairly aggressive here, but not so much as to lose all detail in the faces.

duplicate that layer.

i then added a contrast/brightness adjustment layer. 30 bright/16 contrast.

i then did another noise reduction, but i did this selectively. i made a selection using magic wand in 'brightness' mode with a tolerance of 30 on the dark areas that still had a lot of noise. i modified this selection to include and exclude areas i wanted to alter or didnt want to alter. the end result was cleaning up the dark areas more without affecting other areas.

i then reduced the image size to fit better here on the forums.

there is more that could be done here, but at this point i'd probably start doing hand work to clean the rest of the noise up.

craig

[bart_hickman]

Film can have a very large dynamic range--even cheap film. If you have access to the originals and the scanner, I wonder if you should try doing the brightening in the scanner software while the image is still (probably) 48-bit depth--then at least you won't be boosting jpeg artifacts. I usually adjust (or turn off) the auto-exposure settings in my scanner software to get the dynamic range of the negative safely within the confines of the jpeg.

If you don't have the originals, then Craig's reply looks good.

Bart