Of course, we scan Kodak’s most popular slide film - Kodachrome. This slide film has certainly outsold all others over the years, it’s the most popular slide film of all time. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had outsold all 35mm slide films put together. So we get a lot of Kodachromes to scan, so here are a few notes to bear in mind when your Kodachromes are scanned.Digital ICE
This is a very effective way to remove dust and scratches from images, it can be used on positives or negatives, with the exception of film with a high silver content. Typically Kodachrome falls into this category. So while we’ll do our best with your scans you will probably need to do some manual correction with Photoshop, iPhoto or Aperture if you want your scans to look their best.
Colour Restoration
Where colours have faded we have tools which will bring back the saturation lost over the years. This can be highly effective with Kodachrome.
Colour Shift
Kodak formulated Kodachrome to make holiday makers with a 35mm camera feel as good as possible about their snapshots. Kodachrome has a facility to enhance colours, particularly when viewed with an electric bulb, via an optical projector, onto a high quality viewing screen. It was developed before digital imaging and slide scanners came along.
As a result of Kodachromes recipe for bright colours, when they are scanned there is often a noticeable blue cast over the image. This can be moderated in our scanners by two special features targeted at Kodachrome. First, our Nikon scanners have a special hardware setting for scanning Kodachrome, and this reduces the blue colour cast. When we scan on the Epson scanner using Silverfast there’s a software setting intended to deliver the same result, Kodachromes with “natural” colours.Reduces - not eliminates? No, you may still notice some residual colour cast even after we’ve scanned your slides on the correct setting. This is mainly due to the Kodachrome setting being targeted at the “average” Kodachrome slide; in fact there were at least 36 different recipes for Kodachromes and of course each one is slightly different. Plus time takes its toll on the emulsion, repeated use of a slide projector operating at high temperature bakes the slide, not all processors used the optimum chemistry to develop the original film. Taking all these factors into account there may still be a slight blue tinge evident in your scans.
Removing Colour Cast from a Scan
These techniques apply to any digital image, not just an overly blue Kodachrome. First, you may have a one-button auto enhance facility in your photo editing software - try that. You’ll find you get good results this way in iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, Picassa and Aperture.
Second, your software might have a facility designed to remove colour cast - indeed Photoshop Elements has just such a setting. It works very well and you don’t have to delve into anything complicated such as managing the red, green or blue levels.
Finally, try setting a white point. In Photoshop you can access this via the Levels command. You will see a set of droppers - the one on the left sets black, grey is in the middle and white is on the right. Click on the white dropper then move that over the image (enlarge it a lot to make this easier) until you find a part of the image that should be pure white. In practice it will look a little blue, that’s the colour cast of course. Click on that point and it will be converted to pure white, and along the way that degree of “too blue” will be removed from each element of the image. You’ll be left with the more natural look you were seeking.