"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote in message
...
Vuescan did an amazing job on faded slides when I used it. My father used
Ansco films for a while, because you could get a kit to develop them
yourself. But the slides fade to a brownish cast prettty quickly. Vuescan
handles those very well.

Vuescan can produce good results from slides, but I've never managed to get
realistic-looking results from colour negatives: they look very grainy,
especially on skies (dark on negative) and the colours look artificial - a
bit like the OTT colours you used to get on "colour plates" in books of the
1930s. However the amount of extra shadow and highlight detail that you get
is great, compared with the crushed black and white of a commercially-made
print from the same neg.

That was using a dedicated film scanner. I think the manufacturer's own
Minolta Scan Elite software gave better results than Vuescan for negs, but
still not a patch on slides.

I was amazed with the amount of detail I managed to recover from some very
over-exposed slides. I was taking some night-time photos of illuminated
buildings, with a dense blue filter to correct for tungsten lights on
daylight film. And I overestimated with some of them - probably by quite a
few stops. But the scanner managed to produce good pictures by reducing the
light intensity or the CCD gain or something. Of course, with night-time
photos like that, there isn't a single "correct" exposure - it's very
subjective.

Results of some faded and/or overexposed daylight slides that my dad took on
my parents' honeymoon (so about 55 years ago) didn't fare as well: you can
darken things but you can't put back information that is simply not there in
bleached-out highlights.