Salvage Saturday

Time to pile on with your reprocessed images.

Today I am going back to 1994 and a recently processed Kodachrome 64 slide. This is I believe the Oregon coast at Cape Blanco. As you can see, even restored, the quailty is not up to modern standards.

Definitely Cape Blanco - just around the corner on the right is the mouth of the Sixes River. I used Kodachrome 25 for many years but never tried Kodachrome 64.

My salvage job is from an odd experiment I tried at the Valley of Fire about 10 years ago on the Movie Set trail. I liked the contrasts of the blue skies and the sandstone but was trying to shoot with some extreme shadows in the foreground. I ended up trying to use an ND grad filter along with a polarizer and have a pile of unworkable results from the effort. This one had the least number of odd artifacts in the pile.

Good job with this combo of filters. You ended up with some nice lighting on the foreground while keeping the sky blue.

Ben Egbert said:

Good job with this combo of filters. You ended up with some nice lighting on the foreground while keeping the sky blue.

Click to expand...

Thanks Ben - the sky was almost too blue and some of the offerings in the reject pile had bands of light and dark blues from the filter stacking.

Ben Egbert said:

Time to pile on with your reprocessed images.

Today I am going back to 1994 and a recently processed Kodachrome 64 slide. This is I believe the Oregon coast at Cape Blanco. As you can see, even restored, the quailty is not up to modern standards.

View attachment 48785

Click to expand...

Very nice work Ben. Yeah, for as good of quality as it seemed back then, they don't seem to stand up to today's standards. Though this is still pretty nice.

Was that lens decentered? Didn't one of your other images also have an out of focus lower left corner?

Another image from November 2012. I may try and print this but it is a slightly underexposed file from a 10Mp 4/3rds camera so it may not be up to modern printing standards. Ken

Here is the before image looking a lot gloomier.

AlanLichty said:

Definitely Cape Blanco - just around the corner on the right is the mouth of the Sixes River. I used Kodachrome 25 for many years but never tried Kodachrome 64.

My salvage job is from an odd experiment I tried at the Valley of Fire about 10 years ago on the Movie Set trail. I liked the contrasts of the blue skies and the sandstone but was trying to shoot with some extreme shadows in the foreground. I ended up trying to use an ND grad filter along with a polarizer and have a pile of unworkable results from the effort. This one had the least number of odd artifacts in the pile.

View attachment 48791

Click to expand...

JimFox said:

Very nice work Ben. Yeah, for as good of quality as it seemed back then, they don't seem to stand up to today's standards. Though this is still pretty nice.

Was that lens decentered? Didn't one of your other images also have an out of focus lower left corner?

Click to expand...

Thanks Jim, I did not know much about decentering then, it may well have been. The only way to view it at the time was with a slide projector or one of those light tables. Pixel peeping was an unknown concept.

Ken Rennie said:

Another image from November 2012. I may try and print this but it is a slightly underexposed file from a 10Mp 4/3rds camera so it may not be up to modern printing standards. Ken
View attachment 48804
Here is the before image looking a lot gloomier.
View attachment 48805

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Good job Ken, I like the brightness of the island of trees. This might print better than expected, it's not about detail but tones and moods.

When looking for the original image above I found images for a panorama that have produced a 5,000px wide pano that may print well. It is not the same view as this but it is an image that I prefer. I posted a very similar image in a previous Salvage Saturday but that image was just under 3,000px wide and it would be difficult to get a crisp image from a file this small. Ken

Very nice, I prefer the last one.

Ben Egbert said:

Very nice, I prefer the last one.

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Thanks Ben, I will look at them again. Ken

I finally dug up an old Hard Drive so I could participate.

This first one was from 2004, it was shot on an Olympus P&S, not sure which one anymore. I was still shooting film, but was seeing the handwriting on the wall that digital would some day be the way to go. So I picked up a small P&S with a decent zoom so that I could start practicing processing, etc.. The output of this was only in jpg, and if I recall I had some exposure compensation on it, but I think that was it. It appears that this Olympus output verticals in a horizontal format....

With the Edit, I did replace the sky with the Sky Replace tool in Photoshop. Most of you know my feelings on that, but I figured since it was a plain color, and I was simply using it as a way to recover the sky. I wasn't trying to add clouds or a sunset that was not actually there originally.

Original



Edited

Ben Egbert said:

Thanks Jim, I did not know much about decentering then, it may well have been. The only way to view it at the time was with a slide projector or one of those light tables. Pixel peeping was an unknown concept.

Click to expand...

Hey Ben, I also wouldn't have had a clue about decentering back then either. So I am with you there.

JimFox said:

I finally dug up an old Hard Drive so I could participate.

This first one was from 2004, it was shot on an Olympus P&S, not sure which one anymore. I was still shooting film, but was seeing the handwriting on the wall that digital would some day be the way to go. So I picked up a small P&S with a decent zoom so that I could start practicing processing, etc.. The output of this was only in jpg, and if I recall I had some exposure compensation on it, but I think that was it. It appears that this Olympus output verticals in a horizontal format....

With the Edit, I did replace the sky with the Sky Replace tool in Photoshop. Most of you know my feelings on that, but I figured since it was a plain color, and I was simply using it as a way to recover the sky. I wasn't trying to add clouds or a sunset that was not actually there originally.

Original
View attachment 48832


Edited
View attachment 48831

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Nice recovery and since this was film nice job on the scan, which is at least half the job.

I was using sky replace mostly using the same file but separately processed, now with the excellent sky selection I don't need to.

Ben Egbert said:

Nice recovery and since this was film nice job on the scan, which is at least half the job.

I was using sky replace mostly using the same file but separately processed, now with the excellent sky selection I don't need to.

Click to expand...

Thanks Ben, this isn’t a scan from film, it’s the small jpg output from the Olympus P&S to be clear. It shot at a 1600x1200 resolution, I don’t recall what that would be in megapixels, but maybe 3 or 4?

I was still using my film camera, (The negatives from it are packed away in a box in storage). This was when I knew Digital would one day be the way we were going to shoot, so I had bought the P&S so I could start getting used to using a digital camera, and start working on a processing work flow. I had already been using Photoshop, but not for photos, but for graphics. So I thought it was a great time to learn the new skills that I thought I would need for processing photos.

I shot this digital Olympus P&S for almost 1.5 years, mirroring what I was capturing with my Nikon film cameras. When the Nikon D70 was released, sometime after that I bought it with the kit 18-70mm lens and then I packed my film cameras away.

When I first started using the Nikon D70, I think it was in 2005, I was shooting it totally in jpg. It was a process of over a year as I would slowly start shooting in raw and jpg occasionally if I thought the dynamic range of a scene was too much. I don’t recall why I was hesitant to start shooting in raw, maybe it was I liked the simplicity of shooting in jpg, do a few tweaks in processing and I was done? But I got over that short phase…

So a bit more history then probably needed, but to be clear, this image isn’t a scan of a film negative, but is the jpg output of an Olympus P&S.

Jim, thanks for clarifying, had I read more carefully I would have known it was a digital.

I switched to digital in 1999 with a Nikon 990 and my photography improved dramatically, not the least because it had AF and my film camera did not.

Yeah, I hung on a bit longer then you it sounds like, but I saw the writing on the wall.

The reason I had switched to Nikon when my Minolta cameras just got to a point where they were breaking too much, the reason I switched to Nikon after looking at Canon and Pentax was the Nikon had incorporated the AutoFocus into their cameras while maintaining the same lens mount. I thought that was brilliant as it would open up all of their old manual lenses to still be used on the new Nikon I had gotten at that time, which I think was the N6006? Something like that. Auto Focus sure was nice! Though I did okay with manual focus with the split prism focusing screen I thought.