Can you save this shot?

Question

This is one of my favorite shots, but it is a slide that has faded over the years. The original was taken in 1981 or 1982 on Ektachrome while hanging out of an airplane door at about 1,200-1,500 feet up. Maybe it was 3,000 feet... I can't recall.

I have had an 8x10 version on display in my office for 25 years and it has finally faded to muted shades of brown, so I want to reprint the picture.

I have made one stab at editting for balance between light and dark levels and pumped up the contrast and saturation a little bit. I added some orange in the blown out highlight of the sun reflection on the river. I applied 50% unsharp mask.

What would YOU do if this was your shot?

See the original and also Edit No. 1 at this link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstein/tags/cohansey/

Antoni, I hear you, but read on...

Kitty, the point is to see if we can collectively some up with some ideas here as a learning exercise.

Seamless, see above: "This is one of my favorite shots, but it is a slide that has faded over the years. The original was taken in 1981 or 1982 on Ektachrome..." If I could start with a better scan, I would, so I really appreciate your efforts. If I had a time machine (which is one of my frequent recommendations), I'd go back and use a haze filter. This was one fo 3 shots I took "to get the film out of the camera" before I reloaded with Plus-X to shoot some skydivers for the newspaper. My main subject would not present a problem with haze, so I was not equipped for it. [continued]

[cont.]

I'll take your answer and go through this process myself as it is a great lesson in Photoshop. As far as your rendering, I know that you have no memory of the scene and you didn't discuss it with me, but you have preserved the fine detail of the highest clouds and I like the depth of the ground colors. You lost the yellow of the sunset along the right horizon, though. I'd darken this just so the viewer isn't drawn to the whiteness of that area. Thank you for spending the time and contributing to my education.

Vance - I definitely like the winding river better in edit #2 and certain things about the sky, but #1 looks more true to nature overall. Time machine... I need one to take the shot over or at least scan the slide when it was new. You need one to allow for 26 hours today instead of the usual 24. :-)

Nurse_in_Ky - The lower 40-50% of your edit looks god and then the top half is pretty much lost. I know you didn't set yourself up for this, but a group of us have decided that it is good to simply be HONEST with each other instead of saying how wonderful everything looks. It's a learning process. I hope you are not upset. I do appreciate your result, though, as I can see what is possible for the foreground. In my edit #1, I used a couple of adjustment layers so I could preserve the detail in the areas where yours is now washed out.

Answer 1

Save it? I would start with a better scan, first.

Anyway, I took your challenge and gave it some time to see what approach I would use. I didn't try to do anything with the noise, but I would have if this was something I HAD to do.

The process was about like this:

In Photoshop CS 3:

01. Duplicate background layer
O2. Adjustment layer set the hard light for contrast with a fairly radical adjustment to the curve
03. Adjustment layer are set to screen for lightning with a fairly radical adjustment to the curve
04. Duplicate visible layers as one layer
05. Use highlight shadow adjustment, shadow set to 15% lighten, highlights reduced by 23%
06. Duplicate layer and set new layer to soft light at 35%
07. Collapse layers
08. Blue gradient applied the sky
09. Make a selection of the sky and sea
10. Make a new layer of the selection and apply a high pass filter out a radius of 11 pixels
11. Set new layer to soft light
12. Collapse layers

Without having seen the original I have no idea how it really looked and, not having discussed it, I don't know the representation that would best fit your recall. This is just an interpretation based on my experience with similar lighting conditions. Total time: about an hour, not including the time I wondered why I was doing this instead of working on my website!

This is the result:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Vance.Lear/ShadowsTemp/photo?authkey=eqcAsb1jqTE#5097349791499370242

Regards,
Vance

Addendum:

Okay, now I have a better sense.

I don't think that just adding a sunset coloration will pull the viewer back from the sun and water glare. It will help though, so I did the following:

1. Selected river and made a new layer of it and set it to screen.

2. Used variations on this new layer to increase blue in the mid and highlight range so that it looked more like it was lit by the sky.

3. Then I backed off the opacity until it looked about right in terms of tonality (not to obvious). The shape of the river and the added emphasis from lightening it pulls the viewer more towards the middle and bottom of the image.

4. Created a saturation mask for the sky and sea which I used for an adjustment layer.

5. Created a photo filter adjustment layer using the saturation mask and applied the orange filter, varying the color intensity as seemed right. This kept the blues of the sky from being effected too much by the orange filter.

This is a little more complete answer and here is the edit:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Vance.Lear/ShadowsTemp/photo?authkey=eqcAsb1jqTE#5097533873797676818

This is only for illustration purposes only, illustrating an approach.

The haze you see is from the broad glare created by the sun reflecting off the water and a haze or other filter ('cept polarizer) would have only partially helped. What you are really seeing is low level flare within the lens.

Time for second adjustments: ~ 30 min.

Answer 2

what i would do is take it to a Professional Lab and get them to scan the tranny and and do some magic on the scan for you. alot of latent info will be picked up by a "lamda" scanner for example and the levels can be boosted from the scan.

if you still have the trannie that is, else try a Professional Photo Restorer for the print


a

a

Answer 3

I am not by any means a pro, but I decided to play with this and see what I could do. Please let me know how you like it, I am just learning about photoshop. Oh by the way this is a very pretty shot I don't blame you for wanting to save it
http://www.flickr.com/photos/64342452@N00/

Answer 4

If the shot means as much to you as it sounds like, just take to a digital photo lab.