Aging of Color Slides - After

In June of 2007 I posted a story about how many (but not all) of the color slides I have taken in the last 55 years have aged and lost their color. Since then, I have learned a lot about restoring colored slides - aided by two books on the subject. I still have more to learn, so this is a progress report.

This is the best that I have been able to do with this slide. (See the previous post to see what it looked like before restoration.) It is not perfect. The skin color on baby Nancy looks a little chalky to me. The wall behind my grandmother was actually more yellow. Nancy's sweater was probably more blue and less green. Nevertheless, I am surprised at how much has been recovered.

I expected that Photoshop would be involved in photo restoration and the books that I read used Photoshop examples to show what can be done and how. However, Photoshop was not used at all to produce the version above. The heavy lifting was done by Digital ROC software that came at no additional cost with my slide scanner. Then I made a slight red tint adjustment with Apple Aperture (the software that I use to store and catalog photos).

I did try color adjustments using Photoshop, but in this case using the ROC software when the scan was made produced better results than correction with Photoshop after scanning. I will spare you further boring details unless ask.

In the upper left of the photo you can see some "ghosts" that look like slide processing defects. They are actually reflections off the window behind my grandmother.

(Let me remind you that if you click on any photos in this post you will see an enlarged version that shows much more detail. Clicking on this shows a lot. That Leica that I used 50 years ago took some pretty sharp photos.)

Aging of Color Slides - Before

This slide was taken in February, 1961 on Ektachrome film.

Why the stock market is going down

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Why you should buy a digital camera - Part 2

This photograph was taken in Paris on a sunny day in 1970. The film was Kodachrome - the film that most experts say has the longest useful storage life of all color films. When this film was first developed by Kodak, the color was vibrant and beautiful. It still was 10 years later. Now it is dark and muddy with a purple/violet caste.

It is possible to restore faded positive films, such as Ektachrome, with good results. Some Kodachromes with different faults can be restored. This particular Kodachrome slide is for all intents and purposes impossible to successfully restore to its original glory.

Usually, degradation of photos can be blamed on storage conditions - too much heat and or humidity in particular. However, other rolls of Kodachrome taken a year earlier and a year later than this roll and stored under identical conditions do not show these symptoms. A roll of Ektachrome taken at the same time and stored in the same carousel looks as if it was new. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that there was something lacking in Kodak's processing of this roll of Kodachrome. Recently I have reviewed all color slides taken over the last 55 years. About one roll out of five shows serious degradation with age. All were processed by Kodak.

Photos taken with digital cameras do not change with age.

Recently I have read several articles that say that digital media is wrong for photographic storage, that magnetic tape will only last 3 years, CDs will only last ten years, that ten years from now computers will have changed so much that they will not run the software necessary to see the photos, etc., etc. Nonsense! These writers do not know what they are talking about. Miyama archival gold CDs and DVDs are good for 100 to 300 years. CD and DVD formats are ISO standards. Computer operating systems and software will change, but it will still be possible to read ISO standard disks. (It would be wise to convert your proprietary RAW format images to the DNG standard however.)

Conservation experts at major museums are taking high resolution digital photographs of their artwork so that they can have a digital copy that will not change with age. When we visited the Egon Schiele exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna two years ago we were not allowed to see the original drawings. All that was displayed was perfect reproductions from digital photographs. They were so good that we did not realize that we were seeing reproductions until we read it in the catalog.

So, if you take a photo of your new child with a digital camera, it will be as fresh and new 50 years from now as it was when taken. I can't say that about all the color film I shot 35 to 55 years ago.