SidW
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Post by SidW on Oct 17, 2008 18:10:33 GMT -5
Restored high speed Ektochromes (160ASA) from the seaside town of St Malo just on the edge of Brittany and Normandy. The fishmonger: The Knifegrinder's hat: The beach: Exakta II, Enna Ennalyt 85mm/1.5.
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PeterW
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Post by PeterW on Oct 18, 2008 17:14:04 GMT -5
Nice restorations, Sid. Had they faded very much? The colours are really rich now. I love the first two pictures. These are the sort of street-shot candid scenes I love to find. The touches of humour in the second picture are wonderful. When I was a boy there used to be a knifegrinder come round about once a fortnight with a barrow on which he'd mounted the treadle of an old sewing machine to drive his grindstones, one coarse and one fine. He would also sharpen scissors, and used to do a good trade. I'm quite fond of restoring old pictures, particularly old Victorian prints which have faded or even been damaged over the years. The definition of some 100 year old prints taken at f/11 or f/16 on large format glass plates is sometimes superb. Digital restoration with an image editor really shows its worth in preserving old images. Much better than copying and hand retouching. I don't mind cloning and replacing missing bits of a photograph that have broken off, even if I have to flip the cloned part, but I find some of the most awkward things to get rid of are paste stains where the prints have been stuck in an album with cheap starch paste and this has migrated through to the emulsion and sometimes brought with it a mirror image of the original photographer's stamp on the back. I sometimes scan and restore old snapshots for friends, and their faith in what a computer can do is quite touching. They imagine that all you have to do is scan it in, manipulate a few keys and the computer does the rest. How, for example, do you explain that even with the most up to date software no-one can do much with a faded, out of focus box camera snapshot? The usual request is "This is the only picture I've got of my Dad/Mum/Aunt. Could you enlarge it and just sharpen it up a bit?" I do my best with increasing the contrast and using as much unsharp mask as I dare without getting a bas relief effect. Fortunately they're usually far more pleased with the result than I am. Here's an example of one of my restorations of a carte de visite from about 1900 I found in a box of ephemera in a fleamarket, enlarged approx x2. As found After restoring PeterW
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SidW
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Post by SidW on Oct 18, 2008 19:14:43 GMT -5
Peter, the main problem was fading of individual dyes, particularly green so that the transparencies were dominated by magenta. A further difficulty was random orange spotting, as the spots grew larger they would be urrounded by a weaker orange halo. Sometimes these orange blemishes are easy to retouch, sometimes not, depending on the type of image detail and on the extent of the surrounding halo. The film is 35mm Ektachrome. I've discovered there were two daylight types available at the time, 32ASA that had been available most of the 1950s, and high speed 160ASA introduced in 1959. I assume my Ektachrome was the latter type, since I was using 85mm and 180mm lenses handheld. Here are the scans before restoration: This one had not deteriorated so much, possibly slightly underexposed which might be relevant. Some orange spots just beginning to appear. This one is more typical of them all. This one is very thin, possibly overexposed but there weren't any blown highlights. I intend to start a thread to illustrate the various steps. I'm still in the middle of prparing the pictures. Your restored portraits are splendid. I recall you had a thread explaining your procedure.
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PeterW
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Post by PeterW on Oct 20, 2008 15:46:06 GMT -5
You did very well manipulating the colour channels, Sid.
Also the cropping has really improved the first two pictures. It illustrates once again the old photojournalist adage: ' Get in close and isolate the main subject'.
One photojournalist I sometimes worked with - some of you may remember, he was 'the other Peter' in one of the shots I took in Paris in the 1960s and posted here - was much better at street photography than me, and very seldom used anything except the standard 50mm lens in the street so he had to get in close. But then he had the sort of engaging personality, and the brass neck, that could get away with it. I usually used a longer focus lens, 135mm, or a zoom.
Can't recall ever having used an Ennalyt but it looks to be a pretty fair lens to take cropping like that from 35mm.
I used to suffer a lot from colour problems with Ektachrome, mostly with blue casts in places with high ultra-violet in the lighting such as summer shots on beaches and seascapes.
Never had any problems at all with Kodachrome. I've got some slides taken quite a few years ago and the colour's as good as new. I used it in northern Canada in winter where it was very cold and in the Sahara in summer where it was very hot, both times with a Kiev 4A.
The drawbacks were the relatively slow speed and inability to push process it, and having to send it away for processing. I had the Sahara pictures processed by the Kodak laboratory in Casablanca and, pleasant surprise, they were ready for me in a couple of hours.
I switched to Fujichrome, E6 process like Ektachrome. All the colour problems disappeared, I could get the transparencies processed in under an hour, and so far all the pictures, some about 30 years old, still have excellent colour balance.
PeterW
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SidW
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Post by SidW on Oct 20, 2008 18:28:24 GMT -5
Peter, I remember that Ennalyt lens as very successful and satisfying. The working versions of these slides were much larger than what you see posted here, and I was beginning to get get quite disappointed at the fuzziness. Then I came to a Kodachrome and it was perfectly sharp. Just confirms the old truth that 64ASA is finer grain than 160ASA - and 160ASA was quite grainy in 1961. Otherwise I was wondering if the molecules of the emulsion were coming adrift.
Yes, Kodachromes from the 1950s and 1960s haven't faded or changed colour at all.
This 1961 Ektachrome was process E2.
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daveh
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Post by daveh on Jan 10, 2011 17:36:46 GMT -5
I was just browsing through the threads, and came across a whole group I hadn't seen before. This is one of that group.
St. Malo is a wonderful place - and your restorative results are wonderful too, Sid - partly because the originals were so good.
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SidW
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Post by SidW on Jan 14, 2011 21:06:16 GMT -5
Thanks Dave. The worst thing is the orange spots, they started appearing after 15-20 years, and they get worse with time, old spots grow larger while new ones appear. But it's uneven, some slides aren't affected yet (50 years), others just beginning. They can be retouched out, provided they haven't gone too far. But there are so many that are not worth scanning now. I don't know the cause, maybe it's in the emulsion, or being so uneven I thought maybe it was remnant chemicals from inadequate rinsing.
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daveh
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Post by daveh on Jan 15, 2011 1:16:41 GMT -5
Fungus? As you say though, is it inadequate removal of certain chemicals which is to blame?
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