35mm Slide Samples

Well this depends on a lot of things. How old are the originals, the quality of camera, the lens on the camera, film manufacturer and so on. What we do say is be realistic. There are many companies claiming digital restoration, dynamic enhancement, grain reduction and so on, this is consumer scanners sales talk, no different than made up resolution claims, to be honest most of it is bunkum!

The scanners cannot magic up information that is not there to begin with, if your slide has faded lost most of it’s image and turned magenta then it simply will not be fully restored to a pristine image. This is when we say be realistic of your expectations. Have a look at all the slide samples to see what is possible and the kind of images you will receive back. What we do say is that if your originals are good then you will receive excellent scans back, if your originals are bad, underexposed, faded or in poor condition, then the scans will usually be better than the original image, but we don’t perform miracles unless that is you want to pay for a full blown image restoration where we can then offer miracles!

At Karmaan we have been scanning old slides for over 20 years and have developed a unique workflow to combat some of the problems associated with old slides, the end results speak for themselves and this is why we have a queue of worldwide customers waiting to have their images scanned by Karmaan.

Here you will see how our unique Profiling Workflow improves the final image. The Images on the left of the comparison slider are the ‘Raw Linear’ scans which we take from the scanner, they are then processed through our profiling workflow to correct colours and apply the film stock profile. In some cases the results are subtle as below in the first sample but you can see the difference in the whites and the red telephone box. The original has a slight Magenta tint which is common of 1980s film stock.

The below image is an old Kodachrome, you can clearly see the original scan has a very bad blue tint all over (typical Kodachrome over saturated blue dye), the image on the right after it’s been processed marks a considerable improvement in colour and much more pleasing to the eye.

The image below is an old Agfachrome Slide, again the original image on the left has a magenta tinge and the image has lost it’s vibrancy, after our processing just look at the difference in the road colours, the blossom and the greens in the trees and the bus looks as good as it did when the photo was taken all those years ago.