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#16
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fading colour photographic images
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Paul writes: Paul wrote: [] This is an example of a colorizer I played with. https://s26.postimg.org/eg27sn7sp/autocolorize_021.jpg One weird part, is how the damn thing "can't paint within the lines" :-) That looks like fun to play with! (The "within the lines" bit just reflects how our eyes work; we have much greater luminance than chrominance resolution - that's how the various colour TV systems [NTSC, SECAM, and PAL] managed to squeeze a quart into a pint pot/remain compatible. Manual colorisers have known it for ages: my mum used to colour old engraving prints as a hobby.) The neat part, is it picks colors without human input. It knows the trees are green. And it picked a "parrot color scheme" for the parrot all on its own. That _is_ clever of it. I agree that some day, it'll offer possibilities. Discerning photographic tastes need not apply. Nobody from the photography group would be impressed. Paul Sorry, the URL should be: https://s26.postimg.cc/eg27sn7sp/autocolorize_021.jpg Paul As I say, fun - though not what I was after: I wasn't after colorisation of completely monochrome images; more something that could be applied to, say, very faded colour prints (look around your room, or your parents' or grandparents' - there are probably some there, such as embarrassing ones of you when you were little!). These tend _towards_ monochrome, but if you look carefully, you can see there _is_ colour - but some of the colours fade more than others. I was hoping for something that could reverse that process: I'm not sure how. Obviously it can _probably_ be done manually by playing with the brightness, contrast, and gamma of the three colours separately manually; I'd just hoped that maybe someone would have come up with a slider control that took account of how the _majority_ of such material degrades, to give a slider to bring it back, without having to manually do all the separate tweaking that would be required. It _may_ not be possible, but I think it is - or will be in the near future. If you shot reference photos of color reference plates, in the year the pictures were taken, it might give you enough color transform information to apply an automatic correction. I have a target that came with my scanner, that performs the same function as the target they used here. It's amazing how much difference there is in these scans. Even the scanning process could be ruining your photography... https://www.imaging-resource.com/SCAN/CS9000/9000F.HTM Paul |
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#17
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fading colour photographic images
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote
| So the "hue" control is mainly for newbies (-:? It's different functions. You can adjust "gamma", or color intensity, per channel or linked. Hue adjusts just that -- hue. For instance, if you take a B/W and want to make it look old-fashioned, you could do a colorfill of amber at 10% opacity. What if you don't like the *hue*? You can then adjust that to be more yellow, red, etc. It can be useful to fix a situation like a sunset photo that looks bluish. Or you could make the photo look more bluish to accent the sunset feeling. Or you could use it to correct a photo of a person's face that came out too red. And it's often useful with graphic arts. People often use "shade" to mean hue, which confuses things. Hue just does what it says -- changing the overall color of an image. you'd rarely want much of that, but sometimes a tiny bit is nice. Another example: An African "safari" landscape with lots of tans and yellows, that looks slightly greenish, could be tipped slightly toward orange to make it look richer. With your photos you're talking about RGB being out of balance, but there could be cases where hue adjustment would also help. No tool is for beginners, unless you count all the gimmicky filters that do things like make a photo look like a watercolor or a craypas drawing. And all tools can be used "like a beginner". It's common for people to oversaturate because they think it makes an image look richer. Sometimes a tiny bit of that will help. Usually it's overdone. But it quickly becomes a philosophical issue because with digital it's hard to say what the "real" picture is. Where does touch-up stop and creation start? You want to restore your photos to what you think they should look like, but you might also crop, remove objects, add rosy cheeks... and if you want to spend more money you can get "fashion model" filters to give people better bone structure, give women better curves, etc. (Look at any women's magazine cover these days. The photos are only vague, airbrush-style facsimiles of the models. They not only hide skin pores these days. They can also contort facial features.) I got one of those programs with PSP16. I never tried it. As I recall it required me to "register" and I didn't really have any curiosity about it, anyway. It's called FaceFilter. From the blurb: ""Use the muscle-based facial morphing system to create a desired expression....comprehensive multi-layer makeup system..." So who's to say that hueing your photo to red is not high art? If you can sucker the art fashionistas at New York's MoMA to put it up on the wall then it is. Officially. (And what other standard is there with modern art, after all? |
#18
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fading colour photographic images
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote
| Indeed. But I'd hoped that maybe something might have been developed | that had involved knowledge of how the _majority_ of such fading occurs. Yes. I was thinking about that. I don't see how software could figure it out unless there were telltale colors left behind. There's no way to tell what color something used to be. | Awhile back there were some plugins being | given away. I think they were called Nik - | DxO Optics Pro. They gave away an older version. | | (I presume, since you're calling them plugins, that they go with some | specific software, probably PhotoShop.) Yes. I got them for PSP16, which uses the same kind of plugins. | Being the pedant (?) that I am, assuming I ever get round to doing the | scanning at all, I'll probably keep both the raw scans _and_ any tweaked | versions, so any future person can have their own go. Which might be you. No sense deleting the image with the most data. |
#19
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fading colour photographic images
In message , Paul
writes: J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: [] separately manually; I'd just hoped that maybe someone would have come up with a slider control that took account of how the _majority_ of such material degrades, to give a slider to bring it back, without having to manually do all the separate tweaking that would be required. It _may_ not be possible, but I think it is - or will be in the near future. If you shot reference photos of color reference plates, in the year the pictures were taken, it might give you enough color transform information to apply an automatic correction. I imagine the various film companies have done a lot of that - shot colour reference plates, and exposed prints to varying amounts of daylight. They probably just aren't too keen to give away the data (-:! [] -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf Back then, many radio sets were still in black and white. - Eddie Mair, radio presenter, on "PM" programme reaching 40; in Radio Times, 3-9 April 2010 |
#20
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fading colour photographic images
In message , Mayayana
writes: "J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote | Indeed. But I'd hoped that maybe something might have been developed | that had involved knowledge of how the _majority_ of such fading occurs. Yes. I was thinking about that. I don't see how software could figure it out unless there were telltale colors left behind. There's no way to tell what color something used to be. That's why I envisaged a slider control. Of course, there's no way you could know when you'd got to the correct point on the slider, but if it (reverse) mimicked how the _majority_ of colour prints have faded, then I'd hope maybe it could do a fair job with say 60% of prints. After all, we _do_ have some idea what colour (etc.) skintones, grass, sky etcetera are/were. Yes, there are going to be a _host_ of exceptions (grass was mostly brown in UK in 1976 for example!), but I would have hoped that something could be done in most cases. [] -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf Back then, many radio sets were still in black and white. - Eddie Mair, radio presenter, on "PM" programme reaching 40; in Radio Times, 3-9 April 2010 |
#21
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fading colour photographic images
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Mayayana writes: "J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote | Indeed. But I'd hoped that maybe something might have been developed | that had involved knowledge of how the _majority_ of such fading occurs. Yes. I was thinking about that. I don't see how software could figure it out unless there were telltale colors left behind. There's no way to tell what color something used to be. That's why I envisaged a slider control. Of course, there's no way you could know when you'd got to the correct point on the slider, but if it (reverse) mimicked how the _majority_ of colour prints have faded, then I'd hope maybe it could do a fair job with say 60% of prints. After all, we _do_ have some idea what colour (etc.) skintones, grass, sky etcetera are/were. Yes, there are going to be a _host_ of exceptions (grass was mostly brown in UK in 1976 for example!), but I would have hoped that something could be done in most cases. [] You could combine the trial from he http://www.asf.com/products/plugins/.../pluginROCPRO/ ADOBE PHOTOSHOP 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 7.0, CS, CS2 or CS3 with the version of CS2 Photoshop floating about PhSp_CS2_English.exe which is stored on disk here as... PhSp_CS2_English__photoshop_CS2_1045-1412-5685-1654-6343-1431.exe as your editor. And see whether the output is acceptable or not. Paul |
#22
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fading colour photographic images
In message , Paul
writes: J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: [] That's why I envisaged a slider control. Of course, there's no way you could know when you'd got to the correct point on the slider, but if it (reverse) mimicked how the _majority_ of colour prints have faded, then I'd hope maybe it could do a fair job with say 60% of prints. After all, we _do_ have some idea what colour (etc.) skintones, grass, sky etcetera are/were. Yes, there are going to be a _host_ of exceptions (grass was mostly brown in UK in 1976 for example!), but I would have hoped that something could be done in most cases. [] You could combine the trial from he http://www.asf.com/products/plugins/.../pluginROCPRO/ ADOBE PHOTOSHOP 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 7.0, CS, CS2 or CS3 with the version of CS2 Photoshop floating about PhSp_CS2_English.exe which is stored on disk here as... PhSp_CS2_English__photoshop_CS2_1045-1412-5685-1654-6343-1431.exe as your editor. And see whether the output is acceptable or not. Paul See my reply to Mayayana, who had mentioned the same link; _none_ of the example images on that page show an original image that was faded (in fact all but one show a _darker_ one, mostly with a blue cast). He had a play with some of their images, and wasn't very impressed. -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf "Not an electronic sausage!" |
#23
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fading colour photographic images
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote on 10/30/2018 9:15 AM:
While reading the cropping thread, which has varied into general image-manipulation software (such as IrfanView and FastStone), it has occurred to me that there is something that is increasingly needed: a slider for restoring faded colour photographic material. Let's say mainly prints, as they're likely to be the commonest material that's going to need it. (Films also.) I'm sure IV, FS, PhotoShop, PSP, and the others _can_ all be used to restore the degradation that colour material undergoes, but it would require skill and knowledge. The main reason is that the various colour dyes used in such material tend to fade *at different rates*; the end condition being, usually, a more or less monochrome image consisting of mostly the green dye, which is probably non-recoverable, but there can be intermediate stages where some of the other colours are still present, but in different levels to the green. What I'm envisaging is a single slider control that would apply the necessary corrections in their correct and differing proportions as the slider is varied. (It might have to be a two-dimensional control with the other axis being just overall brightness and/or contrast.) I can see _lots_ of difficulties: the biggest probably being either: different overall casts (colour, brightness, contrast) being caused by different scanners, or: different fading characteristics due to different chemistries involved. But I can't help feeling that _some_ common set of parameters might be usable across the _majority_ of material: certainly, when I see old colour prints that have faded (especially where only slightly - you could say "faded" isn't quite the right description; initially just "colours changed"), there does seem to be a common track the _majority_ of the material follows as it degrades. For the different chemistries, different presets (Kodak, Kodachrome, Agfa, Perutz ...) might be relevant (especially for movie film), but I envisage that as being the more specialist end of the user base; I think a large proportion of the material is likely to fall close to the "main sequence" as astronomers would call it. (Would that be, in effect, "Kodak and its clones"?) What does anyone think - is it _possible_ that such a slider could become a common control in image manipulation software, or is it just too difficult (too many variables)? I quick scanned the other replies to your msg and didn't see what I thought would be the obvious simple choice: increase saturation. PhotoShop offers a saturation control that either works on all color channels simultaneously or allows you to specify correction to each channel. (When I say color channel I mean R, G, B, C, M, and Y even if you are in RGB mode.) In addition, you can vary the brightness of each channel. Some other replies have mentioned hue control. Hue control is actually a method of selecting amount of "sensitivity" between red and green. If you simultaneously select sensitivity between yellow and blue you are specifying the nature of light illuminating the the original scene. When you opt between "daylight", "overcast", etc. with your camera these are controlling the two sensitivities mentioned above. -- Jeff Barnett |
#24
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fading colour photographic images
In message , Jeff Barnett
writes: [] I quick scanned the other replies to your msg and didn't see what I thought would be the obvious simple choice: increase saturation. It's not as simple as that: the colours (dyes, whatever) fade at a different rate (to each other), so just increasing saturation alone wouldn't do it. I think it would need quite complex curves along the track of the control. _Probably_ something like: initially just a general darkening/contrast enhancement, but further along the slider more gain (or offset or combination) on _two_ of the colours (with the cut-in points not necessarily the same for those two). But that's just my guess. [] -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf "Bother," said Pooh, as he tasted the bacon in his sandwich. |
#25
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fading colour photographic images
"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. |
#26
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fading colour photographic images
"Jeff Barnett" wrote
| I quick scanned the other replies to your msg and didn't see what I | thought would be the obvious simple choice: increase saturation. That's been discussed. I suggested he try Irfan View Image - Color Correction before proceeding, but he's got his mind set on downloading a 1-click magic wand. |
#27
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fading colour photographic images
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote on 10/30/2018 9:15 AM:
While reading the cropping thread, which has varied into general image-manipulation software (such as IrfanView and FastStone), it has occurred to me that there is something that is increasingly needed: a slider for restoring faded colour photographic material. Let's say mainly prints, as they're likely to be the commonest material that's going to need it. (Films also.) I'm sure IV, FS, PhotoShop, PSP, and the others _can_ all be used to restore the degradation that colour material undergoes, but it would require skill and knowledge. The main reason is that the various colour dyes used in such material tend to fade *at different rates*; the end condition being, usually, a more or less monochrome image consisting of mostly the green dye, which is probably non-recoverable, but there can be intermediate stages where some of the other colours are still present, but in different levels to the green. What I'm envisaging is a single slider control that would apply the necessary corrections in their correct and differing proportions as the slider is varied. (It might have to be a two-dimensional control with the other axis being just overall brightness and/or contrast.) I can see _lots_ of difficulties: the biggest probably being either: different overall casts (colour, brightness, contrast) being caused by different scanners, or: different fading characteristics due to different chemistries involved. But I can't help feeling that _some_ common set of parameters might be usable across the _majority_ of material: certainly, when I see old colour prints that have faded (especially where only slightly - you could say "faded" isn't quite the right description; initially just "colours changed"), there does seem to be a common track the _majority_ of the material follows as it degrades. For the different chemistries, different presets (Kodak, Kodachrome, Agfa, Perutz ...) might be relevant (especially for movie film), but I envisage that as being the more specialist end of the user base; I think a large proportion of the material is likely to fall close to the "main sequence" as astronomers would call it. (Would that be, in effect, "Kodak and its clones"?) What does anyone think - is it _possible_ that such a slider could become a common control in image manipulation software, or is it just too difficult (too many variables)? I quick scanned the other replies to your msg and didn't see what I thought would be the obvious simple choice: increase saturation. PhotoShop offers a saturation control that either works on all color channels simultaneously or allows you to specify correction to each channel. (When I say color channel I mean R, G, B, C, M, and Y even if you are in RGB mode.) In addition, you can vary the brightness of each channel. Some other replies have mentioned hue control. Hue control is actually a method of selecting amount of "sensitivity" between red and green. If you simultaneously select sensitivity between yellow and blue you are specifying the nature of light illuminating the the original scene. When you opt between "daylight", "overcast", etc. with your camera these are controlling the two sensitivities mentioned above. -- Jeff Barnett |
#28
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fading colour photographic images
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote on 10/31/2018 11:10 AM:
In message , Jeff Barnett writes: [] I quick scanned the other replies to your msg and didn't see what I thought would be the obvious simple choice: increase saturation. It's not as simple as that: the colours (dyes, whatever) fade at a different rate (to each other), so just increasing saturation alone wouldn't do it. I think it would need quite complex curves along the track of the control. _Probably_ something like: initially just a general darkening/contrast enhancement, but further along the slider more gain (or offset or combination) on _two_ of the colours (with the cut-in points not necessarily the same for those two). But that's just my guess. [] I know that. The part of my message that you CHOPPED OFF described the more complete saturation controls offered by PhotoShop that handle a good deal of what you can achieve with curves. PS also offers curve controls on a channel by channel basis but that is much more complex than the OP was looking for. -- Jeff Barnett |
#29
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fading colour photographic images
In message , Mayayana
writes: "Jeff Barnett" wrote | I quick scanned the other replies to your msg and didn't see what I | thought would be the obvious simple choice: increase saturation. That's been discussed. I suggested he try Irfan View Image - Color Correction before proceeding, I will. but he's got his mind set on downloading a 1-click magic wand. Not a magic wand, but say something that will give better - and/or _easier_ - results on say 50-60% of faded prints than doing complex processing manually. -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind. - Mahatma Gandhi (according to the film Gandhi [1982]) |
#30
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fading colour photographic images
On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 12:04:04 -0400, Wolf K
wrote: On 2018-10-30 11:15, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: [...] What does anyone think - is it _possible_ that such a slider could become a common control in image manipulation software, or is it just too difficult (too many variables)? It's too difficult. You need to adjust each colour channel plus contrast, brightness, saturation, and gamma. "Hue" is sometimes offered as a method of adjusting all colour channels at once, but in my experience it's a kluge that rarely works Irfanview and XnView do a nice job with automatic level/contrast adjustments. I recommend both. I use Irfanview, and I've foudn that each batch of film is different, because each one is at a different stage of fading, so really one needs to do each picture individually. For some Irfanview's "Auto-adjust colors" works, but even for those, some extra tweaking is often required. -- Steve Hayes http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm http://khanya.wordpress.com |
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