[Play Raw] Vintage garden revival

Thanatomanic · April 16, 2018, 8:35pm

Hi all, another playraw from me. This time, not really my own picture (I was not yet born!), but my own recent digitization of an old family positive slide. My struggle is to try and undo the discoloration that has happened over the years and restore some of the image’s former glory. Any tips, tricks and examples on how to do this? High praise for someone who can believably edit this into something that looks like it might have been taken yesterday (except for the furniture probably!).

Unedited, except for some cropping:

Slide0094.nef (29.1 MB) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Taken with a Nikon D750 and Tamron SP 90mm F2.8 Di (272EN) macro lens.

heckflosse · April 16, 2018, 8:44pm

Replace the paper with a tablet and clone a smartphone into the mother’s right hand

patdavid · April 16, 2018, 8:59pm

But the colors are gorgeous! I wouldn’t want to mess with it personally. (You have any idea how many hours have probably been burned trying to replicate this look digitally?! ).

afre · April 16, 2018, 9:30pm

Good old days . The discoloration and old furniture is what makes it interesting. I will wait for a license before giving it a try .

HIRAM · April 16, 2018, 9:47pm

Slide0094.nef.pp3 (13.9 KB)
Just tried to refresh the colors from Raw.

ggbutcher · April 16, 2018, 9:49pm

I can’t post a picture from here, but I got it to look better with separate R, G, and B ‘straight-line’ curves, where the black and white points were set like this:

R: black=4, white=230
G: black=0 (unchanged), white=223
B: black=21, white=212

These numbers are simply the data limits of each channel, moving them all to the same place, 0,255, distributes the colors consistently. I learned this messing with removing the orange cast from color negatives.

I’ll recreate it and post when I get home.

Edit: Should have made this clear, I started with the posted JPEG. It takes different numbers when starting from the raw, depending on how much processing has been applied prior to doing the ‘three little curves’… I’ll post a series of screenshots showing the technique after @Thanatomanic assigns a license to the raw file.

paperdigits · April 16, 2018, 9:51pm

@Thanatomanic please assign a license to your file.

Thanatomanic · April 17, 2018, 5:33am

I’ve added the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license after discussing with the owner of the slide. I am still not sure if this is the right way to go, since the author of the picture is no longer among us, but at least I have formal permission of a relative now.

@patdavid I agree the colours are already pretty nice! I have many more slides which have come off worse though, and am just curious if it’s feasible to make it look ‘more recent’.