Revisiting Your Photos

This winter I scanned a number of medium format and 35 mm transparencies shot before going to digital cameras. Shots taken particularly in Maine from the 1970’s & 80’s are in the previous post “Early Explorations”. The scans in this post are more recent; taken during the 1990’s in the Bahamas, Caribbean, and Pacific (including some early New Zealand shots). They have not been published before.

It’s been important to digitally preserve slides that will inevitably deteriorate. This effort has also reminded me that it’s worthwhile taking a second look at your photos, particularly if they were scanned and processed quite a while ago. I am currently using up-to-date software that double scans a slide for both highlights and shadows which increases dynamic range and reduces film grain noise. (1) In addition, I’m processing the scans with the latest versions of Lightroom and Photoshop.

As part of this winter’s fun, I rescanned a handful of slides I had scanned about 6 years ago with older software and had processed in Lightroom and Photoshop. A side-by-side comparison of these files with current scanning software and present Adobe editing tools unavailable at the time showed definite image improvements.

So, it may be worthwhile rescuing your old slides before they become unrecoverable and reprocessing some your favorite older photos with up-to-date processing techniques. The results can be surprising and gratifying.

(1)  “Silverfast” V. 9 software (https://www.silverfast.com) on a Nikon LS 9000 scanner with a resolution of 4000 pixels per inch