Sunday, November 25, 2007

Cleaning Slides and Making Prints

I'm cleaning and re-scanning slides. The slides are of all different types. The wedding pictures are Ektachrome, and seem to have aged quite well, although some of them have mildew spots. I wiped them with a "tiger cloth" (anti-static micro-fiber cloth) and PEC-12 emulsion cleaner; this did nothing for the mildew spots, but did remove some dust and dirt. It seems impossible to get everything off the slides, so some of it inevitably gets scanned. Digital ICE works on the Ektachrome slides, and removes some of the dust spots, but does not work on the Kodachrome slides.

I've also been experimenting with post-processing to improve the color, and making 300 dpi versions of the images for printing on my inkjet. The results are pretty good, now that I'm using Adobe RGB and a monitor profile for proofing. Some of these will be going out as Christmas gifts. Color pictures look pretty good on my old HP Business Inkjet 1100, although it does a poor job rendering blacks. I'm eventually hoping to replace it with an Epson R2400, which uses three different black inks for excellent rendering of black and white images.

The slides also really need to go into better storage boxes, which I'll eventually order from Archival methods.

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