Oh, the 110 film’s long ago processed, with prints, just trying to digitise the negs, as in the guide.
Gimp, Aperture.
It’s not really the light that’s the issue. It’s the sickly green background, and the stange color cast.
My 2c: Don’t waste your time with entry-level tools. No offence ChickieD but that is not a good retouch and Picasa is absolutely not better than photoshop at the things mentioned. It may be user-friendly, but it’s not better. PS is the industry standard for a reason. Millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of person-hours have gone into making it what it is. The other thing to mention is that nothing automatic works for all images. You need to use your own judgement to determine the right look.
This took me about 20 seconds in photoshop. I literally went:
Open
Deselect your black censored bits (because you dont want them included in the auto calculation)
Image > Auto Tone
Image > Auto Color
Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation (this is where your personal judgement comes in)
For this image I changed the hue by a couple of points and increased the saturation slightly.
I would just say this as well: Make sure your scanner bed is clean. Make sure the print you are working is as clean of dust and smudges as possible. Make sure you scan the image at at least 300dpi. 600 is preferable if you can be bothered waiting the extra time and obviously up from there is OK but usually fairly impractical time and storage-wise, unless you’re trying to blow-up the image.
Make sure you’re scanning into CYMK if you intend on printing. RBG is fine if you’re just gonna look on a screen, but if you’re going to print it’s best to start and remain in CYMK because even though you can get photoshop to reprocess an image to/from RGB, every time you do this the program is making choices about what the colours should be. Processing = degradation.
Try to get the image as square as possible in your scan as rotation in image editing tools seriously degrades quality as all pixels are recalculated. If the image is grainy you can sometimes clean it up using a .5px gaussian blur. There are also plugins for photoshop that do a fantastic job at noise reduction.
Seriously, just pirate PS. I use it professionally and all the copies I have on work machines are legit. If you’re doing it with your personal photos for your own collection, Adobe doesn’t need your money nor are they really interested in busting you because companies are easier to shake down for damages in court than individuals.
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Just noticed this bit. If you can perceive the colour imbalance then you want to use the “color balance” option in Image > Adjustments > Color Balance.
You can notice in the dialogue that I’ve set it to 10 magenta in mid tones (thereby offsetting the green). Ideally you should do this for mid tones, shadows and highlights but often you can get away with just changing the mid tones.
My image before:
My image after:
Also, use lightly as this function can quickly take you into the uncanny valley:
Edit: Came back because I forgot to mention two things. Photoshop Express is freemium on mobile (ios/android) and it does some pretty simple one click adjustments, cropping and other stuff well. Google’s “auto-awesome” feature on g+/drive does an amazingly good job for an auto thing.
Teapot’s put you on the right track in all regards.
I can only suggest sandwiching it between glass then to get it a few mm up and prevent curling.
Thank you, I’ll look up some secured clouds, as additional backup possibility. I just have some thoughts, what would happen, if the cloud provider implodes or closes its services… It can happen everywhere, to every web services like Geocities or Twitpic… But again, as additional backup it’s a good idea (plus a nice bonus: you can access your photos from everywhere then, without beeing appended to external hard disc or another geolocated hardware.
[I’m affiliated with none of the mentioned products]
I’ve been scanning film for yars on an Epson V600 with SilverFast.
The Digitaliza film holder/caddy has been an amazingly useful tool!
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