Railfan Technology > Remove magenta cast from old slides in Lightroom 6?

I am scanning some old slides from a friend and several of them have gone south (magenta) over the years. The first one I made into a B&W and am very pleased with the outcome. I would like to remove the magenta cast to it's original color if I could. I am using Lightroom 6. What sliders do I use to remove this cast. Thanks in advance.
later...Wes

Wes Chiles
Topeka, KS

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This looks like an old Ektachrome image in which the green and blues dyes have faded and the red has not.  See this thread on ways to fix things before you use lightroom.  http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?9,3265541

Sneebly in KC

PS: Is that shot in Atchison KS?

Thanks, that helped in that it told me where to start.
Wes

Wes Chiles
Topeka, KS

That's a hard nut.  Below is the best I could get using full blown Photoshop.  Correction layers applied in order: Levels, Channel Mixer, Curves, Selective Color, Hue/Saturation, and finally a bit of Sponge tool to desaturate a few areas that were stubbornly red and were more believable as gray.

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Perhaps a hard nut but very very good end result.... good job on that.

I took your red scan and passed it once through VueScan.  Yes VueScan will scan digital photos. With the filters turned on and the dark shades lightened a little, here is the result.  This should have been how your scan looked.  It certainly needs more color work but the dominent red is essentially gone and some of the other colors look close to right.

I guess what I'm saying is that your scanner software, if it's good, will do much of the correction.

Marty Bernard



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/25/15 14:41 by MartyBernard.

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MartyBernard Wrote:

> I guess what I'm saying is that your scanner
> software, if it's good, will do much of the
> correction.
>
> Marty Bernard

I agree fully with what Marty says,  Do as much as you can during the iniatial scan rather than trusting on post processing to fix eveerything.  That is what I tried to express in my post from 2 years ago.

John

Sneebly Wrote:

> I agree fully with what Marty says,  Do as much
> as you can during the iniatial scan rather than
> trusting on post processing to fix eveerything.
>  That is what I tried to express in my post from
> 2 years ago.

I guess I'm hesitant to concur with that advice, simply because most simple scanning software doesn't have fine-tune color adjusters like Curves.  More often they just have sliders, and if you don't keep a sharp eye on the histogram, it's awfully easy to clip the highlights and block up the shadows when you try to color correct at the scan stage.  Even adjusting the brightness at the scan stage can fatally compromise the shadows and highlights in the resulting scan if you don't know to check the histogram for clipping. 

If one has enough time and desire to do a major level of color correction, then scanning a single slide with appropriate scanning software filters and then some post processing with Lightroom or Photoshop (or PS Elements), one can come out with a good result.

The problem occurs when there are many, perhaps hundreds of slides in a collection that have 'the blues', or 'the magentas' or whatever color caste they have taken on during years of storage.  I'm in the middle of scanning perhaps 1500 or more family pictures for a friend (all slides) that date from the '50s through the late '80s and have encountered just about every imaginable slide degeneration problem.  Everything from mostly black to mostly faded out, to all the greens are gone, to blue, red, maroon, magenta, green and other color castes.  I don't have a lifetime to scan all these slides.  Including removing and replacing them in Kodak Carousel trays that family members apparently have rifled/shuffled/mixed up during the years, and post processing with both LR and PSE, I've found that on average, I'm spending about 2 minutes per slide.  The latest box was perhaps 40% 'the blues'.  I spent maybe 4-5 minutes each with a good number of those, and I couldn't simply synchronize the settings from one slide to the next.  I'd be a screaming lunatic if it wasn't for the capabilities of Lightroom. 

I've also discovered the 'hard way', that a certain, well regarded flatbed scanner that does 4 slides at a time failed miserably...and that included the original AND its replacement!  Results varied from over/under/OK exposed on position #1 and #2, but #3 and #4 were always OK.  And it varied from one scan to the next!  Also, their scanner software cannot be made to scan square slides from 120 film without cropping!  I finally gave up and got a full refund from Amazon and bought a competitors product.  Now I'm 'off to the races'.

Oh, and one other discovery.  As a wanna-be pedal steel guitar player, I found that using a plastic finger pick 'backward' on my index finger makes removing the slides from the scanner a whole lot easier!  I simply took one that I don't use any more, and heated it up in water to allow me to re-bend it for a comfortable fit.      

Evan_Werkema Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sneebly Wrote:
>
> > I agree fully with what Marty says,  Do as
> much
> > as you can during the iniatial scan rather than
> > trusting on post processing to fix eveerything.
> >  That is what I tried to express in my post
> from
> > 2 years ago.
>
> I guess I'm hesitant to concur with that advice,
> simply because most simple scanning software
> doesn't have fine-tune color adjusters like
> Curves.  More often they just have sliders, and
> if you don't keep a sharp eye on the histogram,
> it's awfully easy to clip the highlights and block
> up the shadows when you try to color correct at
> the scan stage.  Even adjusting the brightness at
> the scan stage can fatally compromise the shadows
> and highlights in the resulting scan if you don't
> know to check the histogram for clipping. 

I have had the best experience using NikonScan on a Coolscan V scanner.  I find that vuescan does not do this as well.

6-26-2015
"a certain, well regarded flatbed scanner", "bought a competitors product"

Please don't keep us in suspense! :-) The name and model of the items involved would be appreciated.  I have an Epson V750 Pro, and am considering trading it in on an V850 Pro.  Thanks.

The Epson V550 were the problem child for me.  As a loyal Canon shooter for almost 40 years, I sprung for the Canon 9000F mark ii.  Great scanner.  Better 'build' too.  The software sucks.  The only slides it couldn't scan properly was 37mm square film slides.  Some old film size that I can't figure out.