[Play Raw] Vintage garden revival

nice job or removing the “vintage” from it @chroma_ghost!

All merit to @thomas and @age … I’m just an oportunistic assho… I mean eye :eye: . Cheers Mica :fish:

@afre (fake biblical voice… like a tin unenployed god {Wizard of Oz}) je je je me pistol only half bulleh, cukin rais now but who knows lateh… rivenge isnever hot deesh ganesha, if you nid can burrow my BS fontain, peace and out :grin:

Cool!
My try:
Slide0094
Slide0094.pfi (59.1 KB)

My second
Slide0094
Slide0094.pfi (64.0 KB)

Okay, here’s the ‘three little curves’ color cast removal technique. I mess with a lot of things, one of the recent ones being color negative capture. These three curves, and a fourth curve to invert the negative, convert one of those orange negatives into a color-appropriate positive.

For Vintage garden revival, I first had to rotate the image out of the raw processing, so I did that with my command line program and saved it as a JPEG. Here it is, note the low contrast, no processing at this point:

Take a look at the histogram, and note the upper and lower points of each of the channels. What we’re going to apply are three individual curves, one for each channel, stretching it to the data limits. Here’s the red stretch:

Note the curve, lower and upper points set at the red channel limits you can see in the previous screenshot. Now for the green channel:

Once again, compare the curve to the first screenshot histogram. And finally, blue:

And now alls right with the world, colors are back to normal.

This technique also works for white balance.

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I wish I could travel back to the 80s with a color target, so that we could capture that authentic retro look…

I think that image was taken probably earlier. But yes: Nowadays I wish I had captured a color target on my negatives from the 90s…

Thanks everyone for some wonderful contributions! No one has quite convinced me with a ‘modern’ rendition yet, but a few surely come close. So well done! :smiley: I will definitely take a look at your processing parameters and see what I can make of it myself.
Since many of you also seem to like the colours as they are, I have begun to wonder philosophically if it would even make sense to revive it. The mind can properly paint in the picture of the past, right?

For those interested, I believe this picture was taken between 1974 and 1979. In it you see my grand parents’ backyard of which I also still hold fond memories. It’s my mother beneath the table, but who the lady in the chair is I do not know…

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This was quite tricky… I don’t think I’m quite there. I think you’d need to do a bit of masking to get rid of the original leanings of the film.

Slide0094.nef.xmp (13.3 KB)

Slide0094.jpg.out.pp3 (11.6 KB)

7 Likes

I really like the feel of the light in your rendition, and judging by the shadows (high sun) is realistic - what an awful word that is. Anyway, I DL and fired up your pp3, spy it for a little bit and then mess for another little bit… I wanted a squizzo more separation yet softer and even warmer (less intense) HLs but the sky started to get green… so I guess to fulfill that wish only with L masks; savlaged and bit of skin … got here:

Slide0094.nef_MH_cont.pp3.zip (4.3 KB)

Slide0094_RT_MH_mersiz

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Unsure what you mean by modern. It is challenging to recover the original colours because (1) I am unfamiliar with slide film and (2) this slide is very old and faded.

Thanks for sharing the context. I wonder if this residential area still exists. If so, someone could scout the area and take reference photos :wink:.

Couldn’t outdo the colours the others output, so I decided to take the B&W route. (I might come back to it: I have several strategies that I would like to explore.) Here is the first of the two B&W takes (edit: the second isn’t ready yet). Enjoy!

B&W
1 PhotoFlow → linear Rec.2020 (no clipping) → rotate.
2 gmic → interpolate bad pixels → output multiple B&Ws.
3 enfuse → combine to output one B&W to rule them all.
4 gmic → interpolated bad pixels → discard alpha → brighten → sharpen (tones) → resize → sharpen (edges).

raw default with darktable. Thereafter only GIMP 2.8.22 and G’MIC 2.2.2:

GIMP perspective, scaling and rotation, noise generator.

G’MIC Curves, Customize CLUT, Normalize brightness, Specific saturation, Magic details, Local variance normalization, Ms patch chroma, Add Grain

As promised, the alt B&W:

Negative
1 PhotoFlow → linear Rec.2020 (no clipping) → rotate.
2 gmic → interpolate bad pixels → subtract 2 B&Ws → sharpen (tone) → resize → sharpen (edge).
Final touch
3 GIMP→ mask lady then girl → apply to B&W → curve (girl) → B&W on top of Negative.

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Hi afre, where did you find bad pixels? I thought my camera was still pristine…

Nice b/w results btw :slight_smile:

Glad you like the results.

I don’t want to bore readers with the details, so I group everything that is undesirable under the bad pixel category, which would include defective pixels, spikes in noise and out-of-range data.

When exporting using PhotoFlow, I don’t clip the out-of-range values. I deal with them in gmic, where I do most of my processing. They are considered bad pixels because they cause out-of-gamut issues in the pipeline and final output.

Here is one done with Photoflow. Really liked the skin tones of the unknown lady in this one, also the grass was very unevenly lit. It was easy to make it more uniform using gradient tool of the photoflow.


Slide0094.jpg.pfi (44.5 KB)

Just tried to get the colors as natural looking as possible, and a little selective de noising…

Don’t ask which software i used. you wont like the answer :wink: