I find this discussion interesting because I have had this problem, and have felt there ought to be more options, not necessarily in PL, but somewhere. I use an Epson V700 scanner, and find that the color restoration option in the Epson Scan software sometimes gives good results, but sometimes does not. I guess it depends on whether there is enough colour information in the original for it to be worked on.
But given that the scanner software proves that it is possible to do a lot automatically, I have been surprised to find that this feature does not seem to be available in any of the editing apps I have tried (PL5, LR, PhotoshopCS6, Affinity, C1. One reason for wanting this is so that instead of using the scanner, I could sometimes use a camera with macro lens and gadgets like the Olympus or Soligor slide copiers (MUCH faster than a scanner).
A lot depends on what type of photo you are scanning and how accurate you want to be. Example, I have an Ambrotype (collodion positive) from around 1855. This is emulsion brushed onto glass and hand painted after exposure. There is no way that any auto process could deal with this.
Another type is the Cabinet Card. These existed from the 1860s till the 1920s, however, the actual process and, therefore, image colour varied over the years. It is difficult to get an accurate colour rendition of these.
Early colour prints often have distorted colour either due to age or because they were not printed properly to begin with. The latter is quite common with colour prints from the 1960s onwards. People just seemed not to care what the colour was as long as the photo was in colour.
I have an HP scanner that has two different colour lighting tubes. This does a multiple pass 6 colour process. It is capable of accurate colour rendition but that is dependant on what it is scanning. Some of the older emulsions can cause the scannerâs sensor to misread the the actual colour of the print.
Even with âblack and whiteâ prints there are variations in the tonality e.g. warm or cold papers, warm or cold emulsions, processing chemicals etc. I always scan B&W prints in 16 bit colour.
I have many family photos going back to 1850 (a hand-painted sepia style paper print) and all of them have damage or dust spots that have to be removed.
For negatives, I use my camera and shoot raw rather than use my scanner.
Overall, an editor such as Photoshop is the best tool. Corel PhotoImpact is also good for this.
Photographing a negative works with large negatives. Iâve been scanning 110 film from the 1970âs. A negative is only 16 mm wide. I scan at 2800 dpi. 4" X 6" prints arenât great, film grain is obvious, but itâs the only way.
It works with all negatives, given the right equipment.
The negative format is 13 Ă 17 mm. Meaning, with a 2:1 macro lens I get a 26 Ă 34 frame size.
The âscanâ with an (absolute overkill for the crappy 110 IQ) would then be something like 5800 dpi. Donât worry, more dpi only show more details in the grain structure, the picture itself will look even worse and itâs a waste of disk space. Useless, as there were only few 110 cameras with a lens worth talking about, the rest was plastic waste. Pentax 110 SLR or Minolta 110 comes in mind.
I could not even get the whole negative as I have no macro 2:1 for Nikon (only 2.5:1âŚ5:1 or 1:1), and the one for Fuji is in a set-up for 135 negative reproductions. So it was just a quick and dirty try because you said:
Thank you for reminding me to never use this phrase. There is always another way. If the sentence is phrased like âitâs the only way I know ofâ, it comes closer to reality.
please give Vuescan a chance, because it works also with flatbed scanners and multifunction scanners like my old Epson workforce print, scan, fax unit.
If the photos has already be scanned and you donât want to scan them again in tif format go on the way you ´want with PL, AP, PS or any software.
And pleas give more detailed input about your scanner, or share a scanned jpg if you want better support for your problem
May I ask why you are talking about VueScan which has nothing on board to fix old colors automatically? I donât think itâs the problem of scan software but the problem of how to deal with already finished JPGs. Iâm still thinking, the person advising to save JPGs should be in charge to repeat the scans. So even if the scans would be done again, VueScan has no magic recipe to solve the main problem.
Vuescan supports hardware possibility of the scanner. For the Coolscan for example it supports ICE, ROC, GEM and DDE
Here is a part of Filmscanner Nikon Coolscan 5 V ED, Diascanner LS-50: Test-Bericht, Erfahrungsbericht, Bildqualität, AuflÜsung, Funktionsbeschreibung
âThe Coolscan 5 ED comes with a whole range of image optimisation and image correction methods. The automatic dust and scratch correction ICE, the film grain elimination GEM as well as the colour restoration ROC are already known from the predecessor model LS-40 ED. New additions are DDE and a Scan Image Enhancer. DDE is part of the new Advanced ICE4 and performs exposure corrections. The Scan Image Enhancer optimises the colours and contrast of the image. Unfortunately, what the Coolscan V cannot do compared to the LS-5000 are multiple scans.â
Edit:And for example with Vuescan you can do multiple pass scanning
There is also the possibility to test the software, and like Joanna said there is no magic, because it depends on the basic material. And if we donât get more information I will stop here
The scanner in question (of @Yakawar ) is a brother, type not specified and itâs very likely a flatbed scanner.
ICE is for films, should recognize dust particles on colour films but no help for faded colours and the rest of the listed abbreviations Iâm not familiar with. I guess nothing of it is helping to restore faded out colors of prints? At least VueScan canât help here. Nikon Coolscan also canât help - we simply donât know if the negatives are still at hand. In my experience of 10 years ago, VueScan often doesnât recognize image frames (of slides or negatives). I had one âsmallerâ Epson before I bought a V750 with Silverfast (even worse to learn) and VueScan. VueScan is great for old scanners which are no longer supported, but itâs not meant for hundreds of films and a flatbed scanner with transmitted light unit. It moves the scannerâs sensor to each ârecognizedâ frame separately which is a very noisy and weary process.
Youâre focused on film scanning as I also was when I read the first post. Itâs less about scanning but color restoration, I think.
You are probably right and yes I was talking mainly from the point of view of film and slides. But I had also written about Affinity Photo and the Topaz products in a previous post.
And for those who donât know the Vuescan software yet, here are a few lines about it.
Perhaps also of interest is that Vuescan is available for Mac and Windows
And you might add, that Ed Hamrick usually is rather helpful when it comes to needed features. Except he finds out that he canât help. Trying to get a better frame recognition was such a case⌠at the time he wanted me to send him 1 GB of scan DNG I simply had not the necessary bandwidth at hand.
VueScan is also the only scan-software Iâm aware of able to scan (not exactly true to specs) DNG RAW which it can read. So, instead of crashing my scannerâs mechanics I made one scan of 24 slides / negatives 135 or 8 frames 120 to one machine and the opened the files on another machine to separate the full scan into single images. Sometimes it workedâŚ
So, VueScan has kind of filtering. Thatâs interesting, havenât seen that in my version (but that was an old one, just updated). Now I gonna brag: To test it, Iâd need some pictures with bad colors. But I have none⌠no, Iâm actually too lazy to look for some. I flipped through old prints, but all of them held their colors well. Some are 30-40 years old.
shows some possibilities to adjust the scanner to the pic.
Take a prescan and watch the preview while going through the settings, starting w/ Color balance âŚ
Adjust the single colour channels to (hopefully) counteract colour cast.
And these settings
might help (a bit) with faded colours, but I wouldnât count on that.
For film (slides) I prefer to take a pic w/ my cam and then work on the raw-file,
while Vuescanâs output is a TIFF-file in reality.