Railfan Technology > Trouble with Scanned Images

About 10 years ago I had a pro scan many of my older slides and prints and put them on a CD. I then copied many of them to my computer. They were done as high res tif files.

Now I don't know if it is my imagination or not but looking at some of these after many years they seem to have gotten very dark and muddy which I do not recall at the time when initially looking at the scans. Comparing them to the originals they are far, far inferior in quality. But it is not all the images, just some.

Is that even possible ? Has anyone else had anything similar happen ?

I suspect I'll have to rescan them all over again but then it's almost the thought of, "what's the point" the original print, negative, slide that I was hoping to preserve is out lasting any digital preservation anyway and after only a short time.

I also note when trying to reduce the size of large tif images in order to share on trainorders as jpgs that the color and contrast shift terribly making the images look very poor in quality and too color saturated - which I cannot edit out. I guess I am not sure what means to properly make the reduction / conversion.

If a digital file goes bad, it will become unreadable, not dark. If the images look too dark, or look darker than your original memory, it may be that the viewer you were using was auto-correcting and displaying them brighter.

I would venture a guess that you've changed computers as well as monitors in the intervening 10 years. As such, it's likely that your monitor isn't adjusted as brightly as the old one was. Perhaps it's the wrong device driver for the video card and/or monitor, or, at least, a different version used by Windows 10 vs Windows 7, etc.

Were the original scans in Kodak Photo CD format?

KG

Some CDs, by their nature are not 'long lived'. The recording is in a dye substrate media, and the dye may not be stable. There were some gold CDs. It may be useful to check-google or wiki.

Slow Degradation is very rare on hard drives. It's too soon to know about SSDs, but.....

kgmontreal Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Were the original scans in Kodak Photo CD format?
>
> KG

Well, I am not sure.

I know that there was some concern about the longevity of certain CDs. Certainly some of them can degrade over the years, but as previously noted, with a digital image it is more likely that a file would become unreadable (corrupted) rather than beginning to show color shifts, etc.

However, I am no expert and would certainly welcome more definitive information.