Vorlon Whispers

A Work in Progress

I thought it might be interesting to see how I am attempting to clean up my just scanned slides. Below are the the various stages and the resulting picture. I use Jasc Paint Pro 7.04. They've got a newer version available, but I haven't figured out all the in's and out's of this version yet.

Here's the original photo back from the camera shop without any modifications. Look how dark and contrasty it is. The trees look almost black - although the sky does look nice. The slide was shot on a 3M film called Dynacolor and this was 40 years ago, so that may have something to do with the color.

This is my first change. I use the Histogram tool to reduce the amount of contrast. The trees are still a dark, but not quite black. It's a little hard to see the differences in this small picture. When it's at full screen, it's a lot easier to see the difference.

Still using the Historgram took, I've increased the amount of green in the photo. Now the trees are starting to look a little greener.

More Histogram work. This time I'm cranking up the red. Notice how it makes the trees look even green than before. Go figure. But I think it's getting better, don't you?

This one's hard to see the difference. I used something they call Clarifier. I shapens up the buildings. In this small picture, you can't really see the difference, but when I looked at the full screen, it was very noticable.

Last steps. Here's I increase the color saturation to intensify the color. I also use the sharpener to make the picture crisper.

Don't you think this looks a lot better than the original? I'm still not completely happy with it. Do you think it has TOO much green? The sky seems to have lost some of that deep blue and now looks a little aqua.