Scanning Dufaycolor?

I have now finished a first scan through all 12 packets. A couple of packets contained nothing of interest (I ignored these). Apart from them and the Dover/St Margarets ones we've seen, I have identified locations in Cardigan Bay, the Middle East including Petra, somewhere in West Africa, and Northern Ireland (Arranmore lighboat, to be specific, on the island of Aran). Unidentified so far are a nameless town centre complete with ancient cars, a Burton etc, and a semi-ruined abbey-type building.

Any of that lot take your fancy? [EDIT: general question to those interested in this thread, rather than just Paul; hadn't seen his post when I wrote this.]
 
So here are the quick edits I've done so far, as I mentioned I'm sure better results could be gleaned from spending a little more time carefully editing but hopefully you're happy with how they're looking so far. I've had a very pleasant afternoon with these wonderful old images! :)

bO8kVkm.jpg


B3IGxiK.jpg


91708so.jpg


PlmimH7.jpg


vaKE3dh.jpg


g9OgBFV.jpg
 
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Brilliant! Very little colour shift visible; did you have to correct the colour, or did it come out reasonably correct from the scan?

I really like the reflections in the first one. We have not yet identified the girl in the stripy costume, the following 3 are my mother. The young lad up the tree and in the last shot is my brother (13 years older than me).

You know, from the first glance I got really engaged with these photos, and looking at these in such good quality quite brings a lump to my throat, even though these shots (and almost all of the others) were taken before I was born. Thanks so much for scanning them for me.
 
You're very welcome Chris, it's a pleasure scanning them and I'm really glad you're happy so far!

I've had to do a fair bit of colour correction and looking at them again at home rather than in the office most of them still need a tweak but that should be easy enough to do. When I send the DVD of images to you it'll have two folders, one with the original scans and I'll do another containing 1024 edits. I'm not too sure how much larger than 1024 they can be made for web use due to the reseau being visible but once you have the full resolution versions you can figure out what you prefer.

I'll post more here tomorrow if you're happy for me to do so! :)
 
Sorry I got too excited and did some googling, and managed to identify the location myself. A bit more than a village, but still a surprise.

Here are the shots (terrible scans compared with Paul's; I may have unmount and rescan!):

1)
FDufayC07sm.jpg

2)
FDufayC03sm.jpg

3)
FDufayC08sm.jpg

4)
FDufayC10.jpg

The first 3 positively identified; the last one I haven't spotted yet.

In case anyone wants to try their hand I'll hide the result:
Ripon
 
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PMN said:
You're very welcome Chris, it's a pleasure scanning them and I'm really glad you're happy so far!

I've had to do a fair bit of colour correction and looking at them again at home rather than in the office most of them still need a tweak but that should be easy enough to do. When I send the DVD of images to you it'll have two folders, one with the original scans and I'll do another containing 1024 edits. I'm not too sure how much larger than 1024 they can be made for web use due to the reseau being visible but once you have the full resolution versions you can figure out what you prefer.

I'll post more here tomorrow if you're happy for me to do so! :)
Click to expand...

It's probably worth being a bit selective about posting; I seem to remember multiple shots of the harbour breakwaters for example.

My current intention with these is to get some photobooks made up. D'you think the resolution limitations imposed by the reseau would make printing up to A4 not appropriate?
 
ChrisR said:
D'you think the resolution limitations imposed by the reseau would make printing up to A4 not appropriate?
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To be honest I'm not entirely sure, I suspect it would probably be fine but you might want to get a few test prints done before sending them all off to put in a book.

I'm just about to start scanning again, I'll post a selection of the more varied ones later. :)
 
Musicman said:
I won't feel too cheated as it only took a minute to arrive at the same answer :)
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Yes, it would all be MUCH harder without Google search, Google Earth/Maps, and Streetview, wouldn't it!

Amazing to think that two of those buildings still have the same name and location over something like 70 years! Even the Westminster Bank is now a Building Society.

Now the next lot (all from the same slim packet) I really don't know, although there's something familiar about the ruin...

1)

FDufayJ02sm.jpg

2)
FDufayJ04sm.jpg

3) I'm not sure if this town is the same as the one above...
FDufayJ01sm.jpg

4) I can't really make out the signboard to the right, but this might be a school:
FDufayJ03sm.jpg

Any ideas?
 
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Hi again Chris,

I've scanned all 19 frames, this is certainly an interesting film to work with! The makeup of the film presents it's own interesting problems, the main being the fact that trying to clean hair/dust/etc is made incredibly awkward by the moire effects from the reseau interacting with itself where you clone or heal spots out. Sometimes it's possible to use the clone tool and line up the reseau precisely so you avoid it, either way it definitely isn't the easiest film to clean but I guess they never really imagined these being scanned 75 years after being taken! On some I actually set the scanner to produce slightly softer scans so the reseau wasn't as pronounced, the sharpness of the images themselves is somewhat limited so they didn't really suffer but it made dealing with spots on some of them a bit easier.

The reseau looks rather interesting close-up!

SPpmTq1.jpg


I've done some basic cleaning up on these, at least as much as I can on the main bits without spending several hours per frame. Here are a few straight resized versions of the TIFFs, hope you like them. :)

1hKbxFf.jpg


nCXvQOh.jpg


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BEH7S9o.jpg
 
Brilliant Paul, thanks again! I hadn't thought of the reseau making spot healing harder as I haven't tried that yet. I had thought that a little softening might help avoid any potential moire effects between the reseau (about 1250 dpi, I worked out) and the scan, but I haven't had any such trouble yet.

Of course, most of mine were scanned in the card mount rather than the proper holder, and I suspect are a lot softer than they could be; this may be why I saw so little of the reseau in my scans.
 
PMN said:
When I send the DVD of images to you it'll have two folders, one with the original scans and I'll do another containing 1024 edits. I'm not too sure how much larger than 1024 they can be made for web use due to the reseau being visible but once you have the full resolution versions you can figure out what you prefer.
Click to expand...

An envelope dropped through my letterbox this morning with the scans that Paul so kindly did for me, most of which have also been posted above. They are brilliant, thanks Paul.

The "original scans" are TIFFs of the order of 160mb! The interesting thing is that when I opened the first one in Preview (Mac's basic default viewer), the reseau was extremely visible. The corresponding image in the 1024 JPEG folder was much easier on the eye, although in terms of screen real estate the two were identical.

Not sure why this is; I guess I need to import them into Aperture and have a play.

Paul, did you physically clean them up? They have obviously been sitting around for 70 years or so (although mostly in packets), and have a fair mess of dust, fly dirts, etc. The dirt looks a bit more than the usual rocket blower/lens brush treatment can deal with. Using a damp cloth would seem appropriate if they were anything other than photos. Anyone any ideas?

My current plan is to select some of the best... or most appropriately story-telling... images and make a book, so any not in this batch will likely need to be re-scanned, un-mounted.
 
ChrisR said:
Now the next lot (all from the same slim packet) I really don't know, although there's something familiar about the ruin...

1)


...
Click to expand...

Any ideas on this one, by the way? Having worked out that my maternal grandparents lived near Ripon, I'm wondering if the ruins are near there? My brother Michael tells me that they stayed with my grandparents for a while before travelling to Liverpool to take ship for Egypt.

BTW Michael felt sure there should have been a packet with pictures of Egyptian "antiquities" (pyramids etc), but when he visited my sister last week they had a good search and so far have failed to find it.
 
Brilliant! Thanks...

(And just after I put it up on twitter too. I'll let the world know it's solved. Thanks again.)
 
The last one was Midhurst Grammar School on North Street at the time, but is now Capron House, which recently became HQ of the South Downs National Park
 
Musicman said:
That's looking from the Spread Eagle Hotel to the Swan Inn on Red Lion Street in Midhurst
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The Spread Eagle now the Bottle and Jug? Fantastic detective work, both! Thanks!
 
You're welcome :)

Apparently H G Wells was a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar in the early 1880s.
 
ChrisR said:
The Spread Eagle now the Bottle and Jug? Fantastic detective work, both! Thanks!
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The Spread a Eagle is still the Spread Eagle. The Bottle and Jug is a Harvey's brewery shop (an off licence) next door to the Swan pub - off to the right in your dad's photo, though I suspect it wasn't called that in the day :)
 
OK I must be looking from the wrong end (via Google Streetview!).
 
Yes, It's South Street, I'd used the address for the Swan.

Sorry for the confusion.

Dropped Pin near 2 South St, South Downs National Park, Midhurst, West Sussex GU29 9PD http://goo.gl/maps/T3QwB
 
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... and it's still covered in ivy, 60+ years later!

BTW I think you might have identified no 4; it's possibly the now defunct Midhurst Grammar School that you mentioned, based on Google images. My guess is they were looking for a school for my brother, who eventually went to Ardingly... although I can't quite make the chronology work in my head. He would have been 5 in 1938, which is about right from the pics. I know he went to Egypt, and then they went to Palestine (as was) in 1941/42. I think they did travel back before the end of the war; he described the ship having to go "the long way round" to avoid some of the dangers. So maybe this was just ater their return, when he would have been 11 or so...
 
Musicman said:
The last one was Midhurst Grammar School on North Street at the time, but is now Capron House, which recently became HQ of the South Downs National Park
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Ah, I didn't see this, writing a post and got a page turn!

I think I owe you a beer!
 
ChrisR said:
The interesting thing is that when I opened the first one in Preview (Mac's basic default viewer), the reseau was extremely visible. The corresponding image in the 1024 JPEG folder was much easier on the eye, although in terms of screen real estate the two were identical.
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Hi Chris,

Sorry for the late reply, I've been gigging and been in Manchester making fun of Hooley so I've been a little busy the last few days! :LOL:

The reseau being very visible on one but not the other is probably to do with how the larger image is scaled down to fit the screen. At 1024 it probably fits natively without being processed to fit whereas the full size version is being reduced, this will make them look slightly different. It's a bit like when you share an image on a forum from Flickr at a smaller resolution than you upload it at, the small forum version quite often appears oversharpened because of it being reduced in size but the original version is absolutely fine.

Hope that makes some kind of sense!

ChrisR said:
Paul, did you physically clean them up? They have obviously been sitting around for 70 years or so (although mostly in packets), and have a fair mess of dust, fly dirts, etc. The dirt looks a bit more than the usual rocket blower/lens brush treatment can deal with. Using a damp cloth would seem appropriate if they were anything other than photos.
Click to expand...

I cleaned the actual slides as much as I could but there were some bits of dirt that just wouldn't shift, when the final scans were done I spent some time in Photoshop fixing the more significant marks that were there. They're not perfect but at least they're fairly clean, especially for 70+ year old images!

I'm really glad you like the scans anyway. :)
 
Thanks Paul... I love the scans!

Actually the reseau effect reduced greatly half an hour later; I think Aperture was really struggling to process 19 160MB images in one import.

On cleaning: what did you use? There's no evidence of damage to the slides, but there is a marked reduction in detritus. Clearly some of that was PP, but if I'm going to have a go at rescanning another 30-40 that I want for the proposed photobook, I'd like to safely get as much crud off as possible.
 
Microfibre cloth and 99.9% pure Isopropyl Alcohol will get everything bar deeply ingrained fungus off the slides with no damage to them at all.
 
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