Purple Kodachrome

[StephenM]

As a follow up to the thread on old slides, here's a very quick example of what can easily be done with Kodachrome. The background is simple; in October it's the 30th anniverary of the great gale (which was not a hurricane, only strong winds!). A local group is putting on a small exhibition of photos, all of which will be mine. Out of the 150-160 or so slides, some are a little tired; this is one of them. I just took the straight from the (not scanner, but) slide copier and this is the result:

1. Original



2. A click on the path lower left to indicate neutrality



And finally a quick curves adjustment for the red and green channels:





Nowhere near perfect, but an improvement. And it only took a very short time - about as long as it took to create this thread.

 

[NickT]

I have to say that on my screen, the original image looks a lot more natural than the other two.

 

[excalibur2]

Well I played with the first one in Photoshop and like the result that I got....but others might disagree h'mm back to subjective

 

[StephenM]

Well, given that ALL colour is subjective (a subjective reaction to different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation) it could hardly be otherwise. Only different intensities are objective, which is why black and white photography is realistic, natural and objective and colour is not.

So there!

 

[ChrisR]

IIRC Silverfast 6 had special routines for Kodachrome... I think there were 3 choices: negative, slide, Kodachrome. This page talks about it a bit. I only had the SE version, but I'm sure it was there, and I scanned most of my Kodachrome slides with it.

However, the original slides discussed were Velvia, quite a different technological basis, so maybe that's not relevant.

Profiling the scanner presumably helps in either case?

 

[FishyFish]

Here's an indication of how much of a purple cast some of the Kodachrome slides I picked up today have. This is straight from the scanner:



And this is a tweaked version:



The 2nd version looks vastly improved, although I can't really say it's exactly how the scene should look (and is maybe a little too de-saturated), but at least it's not like a scene from Star Trek anymore.

 

[excalibur2]

Well, given that ALL colour is subjective (a subjective reaction to different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation) it could hardly be otherwise. Only different intensities are objective, which is why black and white photography is realistic, natural and objective and colour is not.

So there!

Well yes and no and ignoring a personal preference for a shot...if anyone puts up a shot and say 98% of viewers say "it's great" your subjective preference for the shot is spot on i.e. 98% agree with you h'mm which could be millions around the world

 

[excalibur2]

Here's an indication of how much of a purple cast some of the Kodachrome slides I picked up today have. This is straight from the scanner:

View attachment 107258

And this is a tweaked version:

View attachment 107257

The 2nd version looks vastly improved, although I can't really say it's exactly how the scene should look (and is maybe a little too de-saturated), but at least it's not like a scene from Star Trek anymore.

Is the purple cast on the slide or is it the scanning? As I've never seen the problem on my Kodachrome slides going back 50 years.... stored at room temp. Some have problems with cyan (well Kodachrome was always good for blues), but never had any problems with my first scanner an Epson 2480 photo (nor my V750).

 

[FishyFish]

Is the purple cast on the slide or is it the scanning? As I've never seen the problem on my Kodachrome slides going back 50 years.... stored at room temp. Some have problems with cyan (well Kodachrome was always good for blues), but never had any problems with my first scanner an Epson 2480 photo (nor my V750).

It's the slides, not the scanning process. They're physically visibly purple to look at. Not all of them though, and to varying degrees - the one above is pretty severe in comparison with some of them.

 

[excalibur2]

It's the slides, not the scanning process. They're physically visibly purple to look at. Not all of them though, and to varying degrees - the one above is pretty severe in comparison with some of them.

We'll never know how the Kodachrome slides had a purple cast (bad storage ?) but Ektachrome didn't keep well compared to Kodachrome and on the net e.gs. of red cast, but nothing about purple cast on Kodachrome

 

[StephenM]

The big difference between Kodachrome and everything else was that Kodachrome had no built in colours - the dyes were introduced as part of the processing rather than being present in the film as bought. This was reputedly why it was the most fade resistant.

In the case of my slides, they were all taken in October/November 1987 and processed around the same time, although I could check the date on the mounts. The slides were stored as identically as slides can be, being never more than a few inches apart in either slide boxes or hanging sleeves in a filing cabinet. The affected slides seem to be confined to certain films, leading me to postulate that either the film was stored differently before I bought it, or that there was some difference in the processing. Apart from the physically different films, the purple ones were all the last in the series (immediate aftermath of the gale with trees toppled, work on clearing the roads by cutting the trees and removing, finally the replanting in the park. The middle series were taken as it was getting dark (you can see the street lights were on) and are slightly off colour, probably more down to slight underexposure. The replanting would have been taken in normal daylight and are the worst affected as well the the final photos. The one posted with this thread shows the trees turned to logs and stacked around the park preparatory to being hauled off.

The longevity of E6 slides appears to depend in part on the present, absence or effectiveness of the final stabilising bath (plus to a lesser extent some of the preceding processing) so if the same applies to Kodachrome, it is possible that there was a slip somewhere in the lab standards.