[womble]

That could only be Cornwall, there's nowhere else like it. Has the Boots slide film faded at all? It looks like it holds up very well in comparison with the Kodachrome shot below it. I used to use Jessops own brand slide film when I was too broke for Kodachrome, and there has been a strong colour shift over the years even stored in complete darkness. It makes the old Jessops slides quite tricky to scan, while the Kodachromes still look like they were taken only yesterday.

The Kodachromes have held-up beautifully. The no-name films and films of other makes have a noticeable colour shift towards magenta, despite being stored in archival quality hanging files. Thankfully, I can use the colour correction eye-dropper tool thingy (technical name that) in Lightroom to get rid of it, providing I can find a suitable area of neutral gray to click on.

I, too, used all sorts of other films when I didn't have enough cash for K64, but none of them have the long-term stability of Kodachrome. The Agfachromes have a tendency to grow mould -- despite the archival storage conditions -- which is a bit disturbing... The Fuji films aren't too bad. The no-name cheapies seem to fade most significantly.

When I got interested in photography it was as a means of recording archaeology and having lecture slides, so I mainly shot slide film for many years. I had the occasional foray into colour prints, and did some BW work at college. Now, I use digital for the work stuff, and film for fun, either shooting BW or a good colour print film like Kodak Ektar or Portra.

K.

[cooltouch]

Kris, I have experiences with slide film that reaches back over 30 years now. Long enough to have to deal with color shifts with processing software. Most, but not all, of my Kodachromes have stayed put -- like I shot the pics yesterday. A few, I've noticed, have shifted some, and I suspect it was because of the way I had them stored. I also inherited a bunch of Kodachromes from my Dad, who shot them when he was in Korea from 1952 to 1954. Those Kodachromes look like they were shot yesterday.

I've had variable results with my E-6 slides. Some have turned a bit -- typically taking on a brown cast that is reversed easily in processing. But some haven't shifted at all, which I find rather remarkable.

I visited Japan back in 1983, and I shot Fujichrome 400 exclusively. All but the very last roll of film I shot over there, I had processed over there. None of these slides have shifted in color. Fuji uses its own process, which is compatible with E-6, but not E-6. Or at least they did back then. And I think that's why my slides from Japan haven't shifted. Also, I have developed my own E-6, going back as far as 1985. None of the slides I developed myself have shifted. At all. I wish I could remember the chemicals I used. I think they were Unicolor. Anyway, just thought I'd toss my experiences out there. Have any others experienced anything similar, I wonder?

[Dartmoor Dave]

Most, but not all, of my Kodachromes have stayed put -- like I shot the pics yesterday. A few, I've noticed, have shifted some, and I suspect it was because of the way I had them stored. I also inherited a bunch of Kodachromes from my Dad, who shot them when he was in Korea from 1952 to 1954. Those Kodachromes look like they were shot yesterday.

That's really got me thinking, because there's some variance in how some of my own Kodachromes have aged as well, under identical storage conditions.

For my first few years of shooting K64 I lived in the USA, and if I remember correctly I used to buy the film without pre-paid processing and get it developed via a local lab. So presumably the local lab sent it somewhere else with the proper machinery to process it. The slides from my Arizona years have aged perfectly and look incredibly fresh, but the slides from my time in New York have lost some saturation and picked up a slight blue/purple colour shift.

Then in 1986 I moved to the UK, where you could only buy K64 with pre-paid processing by Kodak. Every slide from that period still looks like it was shot yesterday, and the feeling of time travel from projecting them big is almost spooky. I stopped using Kodachrome when the processing was moved to Switzerland (I think it was Switzerland), so I don't know if that would have made any difference.

I have no idea why those chromes from New York in the early eighties haven't aged as well, but I bet somebody here will know why.

[womble]

Excavations at Audley End, Sept 1987. Shot on Agfachrome, Pentax ME Super, M28/2.8 lens (I guess).


2512 Audley End small par Kris Lockyear, on ipernity

[RobG]

I visited Japan back in 1983, and I shot Fujichrome 400 exclusively. All but the very last roll of film I shot over there, I had processed over there. None of these slides have shifted in color. Fuji uses its own process, which is compatible with E-6, but not E-6. Or at least they did back then. And I think that's why my slides from Japan haven't shifted. Also, I have developed my own E-6, going back as far as 1985. None of the slides I developed myself have shifted. At all. I wish I could remember the chemicals I used. I think they were Unicolor. Anyway, just thought I'd toss my experiences out there. Have any others experienced anything similar, I wonder?

I shot hardly any Kodachrome because of the hassle of processing it, and the fact that my elder brother lost most of his Kodachrome slides to the process of sending the films to Kodak for processing. I preferred Fujichrome colours anyway, so most of the slides I have are some kind of Fujichrome. I have Ektachrome which my father took and the colours have shifted significantly, but could be recovered with Vuescan. I have a single roll of Agfachrome I tried which had poor colour balance after processing and is now horribly colour shifted. I've be interested to look at the slides which were processed by Fuji in Brisbane or Japan and compare them with the Fujichrome films which were processed elsewhere. The Fujichrome I processed in the USA has colour shifted quite a bit. I think there was very little colour shift in the films I processed in Japan in 2002, which were also mostly Fujichrome 100F.

I've never processed colour film myself, only B&W.

[wkraus]

I used to shoot Agfachrome slide film for many years because I loved its subdued colours. Many of the slides look awful now with varying colour shifts. However, if there are no spots (which there are in some cases) it is possible to reconstruct the (presumable) original colours in Photoshop.

Lower Austria, 1986, Pentax MX, probably with smc Pentax-M 1:2.8 100mm, Agfachrome 50 RS film, present state of the slide (first image) and restored colour (second image).

[cooltouch]

Wow, that's a pretty good rescue. I am not even a Photoshop expert. Was there a single Photoshop command you used, or more than one?

---

Last edited by cooltouch; 02-17-2018 at 08:13 PM.

[RobG]

This is the result of using the colour restoration setting on Vuescan with a 50 year old Ektachrome slide. The image without colour restoration was Nikonscan. Nikon LS30 scanner.


Vuescan vs Nikonscan by RobGeraghty, on Flickr

---------- Post added 18-02-18 at 07:58 PM ----------

Excavations at Audley End, Sept 1987. Shot on Agfachrome, Pentax ME Super, M28/2.8 lens (I guess).
2512 Audley End small par Kris Lockyear, on ipernity

Is it an amphitheatre?

[womble]

Is it an amphitheatre?

It was the formal gardens at the back of a stately home. English Heritage (now Historic England) wanted to restore the gardens on the original plan. It also gave us the chance to examine the remains of the abbey that preceeded the house.

K.

[RobG]

It was the formal gardens at the back of a stately home. English Heritage (now Historic England) wanted to restore the gardens on the original plan. It also gave us the chance to examine the remains of the abbey that preceeded the house.

Thanks! Looks like the services were laid without regard for the archaeology. After watching every episode of Time Team, this sort of thing fascinates me!

[dagsadoo]

Taken in 1987 with my Pentax P30, a Tokina 35-200 zoom and using Fuji film 200.

[wkraus]

Wow, that's a pretty good rescue. I am not even a Photoshop expert. Was there a single Photoshop command you used, or more than one?

Sorry, I haven't been around for a few days. I'm mostly doing this with non-linear curves (Image > Adjustments > Curves...). It takes a little time to get it right. The Vuescan auto correction demonstrated by RobG works well but only in a linear way if I understand correctly, that is, by adjusting black and white points to neutral. I might be wrong though.

[LesDMess]

In September 1957, Popular Photography wanted to show the world's fastest color film then - Super Ansochrome 100, and published the article titled the Most Photogenic Girl in the World - Venetia Stevenson. They included a copy of the slide in the magazine which I bought back in 2013.

Here is a scan of the whole slide


Here is a scan of the image of the slide


It is not critically sharp at 4000dpi but that is most likely because it was one of tens (maybe hundreds?) of thousands of copies made but not too bad. Could also be poor focus or camera shake given the setting? Otherwise, seems to have held up over the years.

[cooltouch]

Hey Les, that's a nice looking image. I was guessing that there's still more color hiding in that shot, so I put it through a couple of routines in Paint Shop Pro. Here's what I came up with. All in all, not a bad emulsion, I'd say. Its color may have shifted some over the past several decades, but not so much as to be unrecoverable.

[LesDMess]

Hey Les, that's a nice looking image. I was guessing that there's still more color hiding in that shot, so I put it through a couple of routines in Paint Shop Pro. Here's what I came up with. All in all, not a bad emulsion, I'd say. Its color may have shifted some over the past several decades, but not so much as to be unrecoverable.

Don't be adding an extra decade where it is not needed, it's just been six decades . . .

As far as the colors are concerned, I wasn't really sure given the setting and the film's response but I verified it to be accurate to the slide. I've worked on it myself but in the end I find the warmer tones and the subject matter to be more pleasing. Not bad at all for a slide six decades old.