I was given a CD with a bunch of super old slides that had been scanned, by super old I mean sort of 1900's. Anyway they were in a fairly poor condition and they were still negative images. I will post before and after images. I opened them in Lightroom but this can be done in Camera RAW (photoshops RAW processor) even though the images were jpegs they can still be processed to a certain extent using RAW converters. Anyway the first step was to remove any colour as this was due to age, the photos will have been in Black and White or sepia. Then, in Lightroom, I dragged directly on the histogram to make the tonal width as wide as possible this meant dragging the exposure to the right and the Blacks to the left (It's a strange system but this boosts both the blacks and the exposure) as I did this the picture started to come out, I then increased the clarity (boosting midtones) and added a little more contrast.
The image was then opened in photoshop and a simple invert adjustment layer was added, this converted the negative image and then I added a B&W layer and tinted it sepia. It was really interesting to see some of these old images as a lot of them were composed really well, I guess it was because you only had a camera then if you knew how to use it! Surprisingly there wasn't a great deal of metadata attached to the image, I doubt the glass was as high tech by today's standards and I imagine the camera was moved by crane!
No comments:
Post a Comment