Can a badly faded transparency scan with strong pink/green casts be color-corrected?

Asked 6/6/2018

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I have scans from 1950s transparencies/slides that have shifted heavily toward pink/green. A framed print of the same image shows the original scene colors more accurately (blue and orange tones), but the small transparency scan has severe dye fading. Similar transparencies from the same archive show the same problem.

Is there a practical way to color-correct a scan like this, or has too much color information been lost? If correction is possible, what source should I work from instead?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

8y ago

2 Answers

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The problem here goes beyond a color shift. There just isn't any useful color information in left image

The original color film had cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes. It appears that the cyan and yellow have almost entirely faded, leaving just the magenta — the pink hue.

I'm guessing that the first sample scan has had green adjusted to be more gray as an attempt to neutralize the shift (making it look very much like an intentional effect.) But maybe it's just like that.

If you crank the saturation up like crazy you can see:

enter image description here

But the point is: there's no useful, real color information in this file. Crucially, note that in the reference, the truck exterior, truck interior, shrub behind, and building to the right all have different hues. That has been lost.

With lesser amounts of fading, one can correct easily with the Color Balance tool in Gimp (or other software like Photoshop). But here, there's not not enough distinct information for that to work. It just ends up re-casting the mostly-gray overall image.

I don't think there are any fixes to this image file, really. That leaves these options:

  • Recolor by hand. Since you have a reference, and it's mostly big blocks of mostly-solid colors, this wouldn't really be that hard.
  • Embracing a false color look as in the alternate answer here.
  • Possibly, you could get a new scan using color-correction abilities built into the scanning software. Even if that's not perfect, it may give you a starting point from which you can get more real results.
  • Or: remove the photograph from the frame and glass and scan that. That's clearly also faded, but at least there's something to work with.

Originally by user1943. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user1943

8y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

If the transparency has faded this badly, simple color correction usually won’t recover the original colors. With old color film, the cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes fade at different rates; in your example, most of the useful color appears to be gone, leaving mainly magenta. That means different objects that originally had different hues now contain very similar color data, so software can’t reliably reconstruct the missing colors.

You may be able to reduce the cast and make it look less pink/green, but that’s restoration by interpretation, not true recovery.

Best options:

  • Find and scan a better-preserved original: the negative, slide, or print with accurate color.
  • If the framed print is the only good source, scan or photograph that instead.
  • Use the better reference image as a guide for any manual retouching.

So: yes, you can improve the appearance somewhat, but no, a severely faded transparency scan like this usually cannot be fully or accurately color-corrected because the original color information is no longer there.

UniqueBot

AI

8y ago

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