Jim's Photo Page - Restoring Old, Damaged Slides

This is a photo which, like many we all have, is valued for sentimental rather than artistic reasons. This was taken sometime in the mid to late 1950s. Every summer my family would head for the mountains of Colorado for a few days to a week. These were fun trips and are now treasured memories. We would head west on US 50 or US 160. Sometimes we had a specific location in mind and sometimes we would just wander and explore.

This photograph is of my younger brother and myself.

This slide was already in bad shape when it fell into my hands a few years ago. It is scratched and filled with embedded grit. Some of the color dyes are fading with age. Some slide films were quite archival back then (particularly Kodachrome as you can see elsewhere at this site) but many were not and this one shows the ravages of time.

I did not attempt to clean this slide for fear of further damage. Without using great care, removing embedded grit can scratch a slide. Digital photography now provides a way to save slides like this. I began with a high resolution scan to get the image into my computer.

Using the tools in PHOTOSHOP (the LE edition works fine for all of this) I enlarged the CANVAS and used ROTATE CANVAS - ARBITRARY to level the image so my brother and I (and the tree) aren't leaning.

Jim and John, Colorado 1950s (Rotated)

As you can see, I had to use the CLONE tool to invent a little more sky, tree and road to fill in the blank areas after rotating the image. While I was at it, I used the CLONE tool to fill in the damaged area at the bottom.

I used AUTO LEVELS to change the look of the overall image. Then I tweaked the colors a little more with COLOR BALANCE. Due to uneven fading of the dyes, the sky was still off color after everything else looked normal. I used the MAGIC WAND to select the sky to further correct its color.

I used the clone tool to eliminate grit and scratches. The original slide was not very sharp, so I sharpened the overall photo with UNSHARP MASK. The result is much closer to what the original must have looked like.

Once a slide is corrected in the computer, it can be output to a printer to make a print, or output to a film recorder to make a new slide.