Scanning Realist slides and View-Master Reels in HD 3D. By John M. Clement

Transcription

1 Scanning Realist slides and View-Master Reels in HD 3D By John M. Clement While viewing View-Master slides is a very pleasant pastime, some collectors may want to view them on digital devices. Unfortunately newer View-Master reels were not duplicated on Kodachrome in the late 1960s, so the newer ones faded very badly. Some of the early ones were out of focus or had severe color fringing. By going to digital, many of these defects can be repaired and you can enjoy your pictures on a 3D TV or other digital 3D displays. The gain in clarity and beauty may offset the pleasure of pulling the lever to see the next picture. Also you can share with friends in your livingroom. For software I use Corel PaintShop Pro, Focus Magic, and Kodak plug-ins. To create the final slides and also to view them I use the free StereoPhoto Maker. The hardware is an Epson V500 with a dual core 2.7 GHz Athlon processor. This is still a bit slow even though the recent version of Focus Magic utilizes multiple cores. The first problem is that the reels will not fit into standard slide scanners, so the only affordable option is to buy a flatbed scanner that handles slides. The Epson V500/600 and V700/750 work very well. There are good reports on the V750, but it is 4 times the cost of the V500. The V500 can scan at 6400 dots/inch, while the actual resolution of the product is around But this can be fixed. The product Focus Magic does an excellent job of refocusing the images. Of course you don t get increased focus for free. Refocusing increases the noise. So after refocusing, some noise reduction is needed. The best solution would be to use a high resolution slide scanner, but the affordable ones only scan standard 35 mm slides. Faded slides can be improved by using the scanner s built in color correction or your photo editor s color correction. I use either of these or Digital Roc by Kodak. You can use the Digital ICE feature of the scanner to remove dust in newer slides which were not duplicated on Kodachrome. Digital ICE sometimes works for Kodachrome. It only partially removes dust and will often introduce severe defects into the slides. So hand removal is still needed and you have to watch for extraneous black lines or missing black detail. After stitching together the two images, refocusing, color correction and noise reduction, the final step is to make an acceptable 3D image. StereoPhoto Maker can display the image on a 3D monitor and in other formats such as side-by-side or anaglyph. Use the automatic adjustment option to align the slide for best viewing without eye strain. Then the slide can be aligned right to left and cropped for best framing. Finally a fuzzy border with rounded corners will remove the jagged corner edges. The final pictures look good on an HD 3D monitor. Now if you want the true View-Master experience you might omit the dust removal and refocusing. The final scan sometimes looks better than the original even when viewed on a Model D View-Master. But the scanning process can also bring out slight defects and certain details can be obscured. Typical sequence 1. Here is a typical sequence of operations for one three reel set of View-Master slides. 2. Put reel into the scanner with the slide feature enabled. Click Preview. Select a small area around each frame. Be careful not to include the sprocket holes in the reel, or mask them off. Then scan the reel at 6400 dpi with no features on except for possibly color restoration and ICE. It should be stored as a TIF image for later editing. JPG should not be used because can introduce extra problems when editing. If the reel is badly faded, it is probably not Kodachrome so ICE can be

2 safely used. But I have sometimes gotten good results with ICE on View-Master reels. I generally scan 6 to 8 pictures at once. The reel should be scanned face down or the resulting images need to be mirrored. The final slide will be viewed at 1080x1920 but the scanning produces a usable 3D image at 2800x3250. Editing should always be done on a slide which is higher in resolution than the final viewing resolution, and the final picture can then be reduced if necessary. But I keep the high resolution in case I eventually have a 2k monitor that can show 2160x Some slides are mostly dark with some bright spots, and this can fool the autolevel settings. You will see bright white areas with very sharp edges and no detail when this happens. The only solution is to rescan with the white level set higher. On the V500 you can only set one frame at a time by clicking on the histogram next to the autolevel button. 4. Open the right and left images for one 3D picture. Rotate and crop the pictures. Then using Canvas Size double the width of the left frame to make room for the right frame. Make sure the left frame is on the left. You can recognize the left frame because it is missing some details that appear on the left of the right frame. Then copy and paste the right frame into the full frame. 5. Use the Focus Magic plug-in to refocus the slide. I usually do it twice to achieve the best focus. First I focused using width=10 for source=film camera. Then I focused it again using width=7, amount=100-50%. Focus magic has a problem that it adds lines along edges with sharp contrast, so backing off on the amount of focusing can help reduce this problem. The focus detection can often be fooled, so try various areas of the slides and check several details. Some View-master slides have images that were photographed out of focus and this can be corrected by Focus Magic. For the Niagara Falls in Winter reel I had to go up to width=19 to get good sharp focus. But on one slide on another reel I had to use width=8 first. But sometimes the second focusing works better with wider width at 50% level. Too much refocusing produces stray black dots and lines. Sometimes it is possible to reduce fuzzing around edges by a third refocus with high width at 25%. Getting this right can be very tricky. Once in a great while I had to remove a small amount of motion blurring using the motion blurring filter in Focus Magic. 6. Then I used the Edge Preserving Smooth at width 7 or 5 and finally Median Aperture at width 5 or 7. This removes some grain and smooths the jagged edges of objects. But the Edge Preserving smooth is sometimes not necessary. The Digital noise reduction only should be used for very noisy pictures. Often it works best with moderate small detail strength and low medium/large detail strength. Ideally a higher resolution scanner with lower noise would produce better images. Sometimes I could go to lower values to preserve sharpness of fine detail. Some slides have a lot of dark noise. These can be corrected by Kodak Digital Gem. I usually set the highlight noise reduction low and then adjust the shadow noise reduction for best results. 7. The slide should be viewed at high magnification and stray dirt removed manually. While the ICE process removes a lot of dirt, it is not perfect and it can not remove emulsion defects. ICE can also leave some faint images of the removed dirt which can still be visible. In addition some color correction might be needed. I have found that the Color Vibrancy adjustment is helpful for faded slides. Unfortunately 3D viewing is much more critical than 2D. So for slides with lots of dirt you may have to come back to this step later. You can view the slide at high magnification in 3D and then edit out dirt, or clone details from the right or left image to the other. Another correction that might be needed is for chromatic aberration. If you have colored fringes on one side of an object this correction can remove them, but you have to carefully select just the fringe area and it is often a laborious process. At this point you can spend the most time fixing small defects. 8. If the built in color correction for your scanner did not do an adequate job you may need to use the color correction in your photo editing software. I use Digital ROC by Applied Science Fiction and it seems to do the best job. But no particular software works well for all cases, so you may have to experiment to get the best results.

3 9. Finally the slide needs to be processed by StereoPhoto Maker. After opening the slide use the Auto Alignment (Adjust tab) to line up the images for minimum eye strain. Then view the two images in 3D. If you don t have a 3D monitor you can use anaglyph. Line up the frames using the right or left arrow keys. Usually you will have to use the right arrow key. Usually you can see that the frames do not line up exactly. The tops and bottoms are often misaligned, and the misaligned portions should be removed. Crop the image so as to remove the misaligned portions, but ignore misalignment in the corners. Finally use Add Fuzzy Border (Edit tab) to crop off the corners. I use width=1pixel, corner=500pixels for View-Master slides. 10. The last step for making a good slide is to use Auto Color Adjustment. View the slide as a side by side image. You may notice that they are slightly different colors. Click on the Auto Color Adjustment and then on either Left or Right depending on which color you like better to correct this defect. 11. Now you can save the slide. Be sure you are viewing the slide side-by-side and click on save. You can first save it to TIF for archiving, and then save it to JPS or JPG. If you want MPO you need to select Save to MPO. 12. But in the end you have to decide what parameters to use when restoring the pictures. My values were from a slightly faded but good quality reel. It is possible to scan with a less expensive scanner, and get very good images, but you may need more processing. 13. This can be a very time consuming process to produce good digital 3D images. There are services that will scan Realist slides, or View-Master reels. But they will often only do it in 2D and they will usually not scan copyrighted commercially produced slides unless you own the copyright. So if you really want your reels of slides in digital form, you will probably have to do it yourself. What is the cost of the necessary hardware/software? 1. Epson V500 can be purchased as low as $150, while the V750 currently is as low as $ Paint Shop Pro is much cheaper than Photoshop and sometimes last year s version is free with a rebate. 3. Kodak Digital ROC & GEM each cost around $50. ROC is only needed for badly faded pictures, while GEM is useful, but other filters can be used Focus Magic costs around $45. Even with a very high resolution scanner this is a must. The standard sharpening options are not as good as this plug-in. 5. StereoPhoto Maker is free! Realist Stereo Scanning The process for scanning Realist format slides is similar to View-Master, but this can be easily done using a good quality slide scanner instead of a flatbed. The results are excellent. I use the Plustek 7600i scanner which is very good and comes with Silverfast. The newer Plustek 8200i is the same hardware. The Plustek achieves an acceptable 3600 effective resolution but can scan at The main problem is that the usual slide carrier is not designed for Realist format. So either the film has to be demounted and scanned in the film carrier, or the slide carrier has to be modified. To do this the barrier between two of the slides has to be removed. In addition a paper mask may be needed to cover part of the opening. Of course with a good quality film scanner less refocusing is necessary. The Silverfast software can sometimes do good digital dust removal with Kodachrome, but usually it introduces artifacts if not adjusted properly. To use Silverfast with Kodachrome you must set the correction level by viewing sections of your slides with and without correction. This is a time consuming process. Silverfast in my opinion does not give the best color balance. Vuescan software is a good investment because of its adjustability, and it also does sometimes does infrared dust removal well. In addition I think it gives more realistic color for Kodachrome slides.

4 Sample Scans An example of processing with Kodak Digital ROC. These reels often did not respond to the scanner color correction and only ROC would bring out the color correctly. Before processing After Digital ROC With and without Digital ICE Looking at the two scans you can see that ICE reduced the scratch, but still did not totally remove it. It left jagged edges and a ghost image of the scratch. This was a non Kodachrome picture. Usually it would remove dust well enough to make it unobvious and save a lot of my time. The left picture shows how ICE removed part of the dark Kodachrome image, while the center image is intact. But ICE did remove a scratch (not shown). The right image shows the final product after refocusing and noise reduction.

5 Sample finished scans Notice how more of the pine tree on the far left is showing in the right frame. This is the clue as to which frame is which in this Kodachrome. Enlarged detail showing after and before refocusing

6 Early Kodachrome with no color shift This very early Kodachrome reel was very dark and the pictures were a bit out of focus with. All pictures had significant chromatic aberration and the final picture had severe aberration which was difficult to fix. Some background lightening was necessary.

7 Early Kodachrome which was in excellent condition with superb colors and ICE was OK Very Early Kodachrome which has some color shifting towards the blue in patches. This could easily be fixed in the sky region by cloning, but the water was too difficult. The color shifting was not as evident when viewed in a Model D View-master, or in other models. This is an example where scanning brought out the defect, possibly because the scanner blue sensitivity does not line up with the emulsion.

8 Very Early before 1946 Kodachrome. ICE misbehaved on most of this reel.