Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/08/07
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]After an entire evening's wrestling with a legacy ISA SCSI card, I got my LS-2000 hooked up to the Overstuffed Ancient Home PC last night. I thought I'd try out one of the 50 year-old slides I unearthed during my parent's recent move. Have a look: http://www.2alpha.com/~pklein/oldpics/EmMiltLap51.jpg It's a Kodachrome I slide from 1951. That's ASA/ISO 10, folks! I ran a 2700 dpi scan using VueScan's Kodachrome setting, with the sides cropped off to the middle 2/3 of the slide. The slide was noticeably dirty, so I used the dirt/scratch removal (VueScan's version of Digital ICE, I guess, since it uses the IR channel). The "cleaned" version is slightly less sharp than the unaltered version, but you barely notice it until you really zoom in on the screen. The JPEG linked to was sized down 3:1 and sharpened in Irfanview, and saved as a 90% quality JPG. In the original TIFF, you can't see individual hairs, but there is texture in the whisps of hair. There is some grain aliasing, but I don't think enough to matter for an 8x10. I'll have to look at the slide with a 30x magnifier to see how much difference it really makes. Anyway, the colors are pretty close to the original slide with no color tweaking--for instance, the greenish walls and flesh tones look about right, and you can see a clean white in one of the picture frames above their heads. This was just a quick and dirty scan to see what quality I could get out of an old 'chrome with minimum effort. The answer is, quite a bit. To make it sorta on topic, the picture was not taken with a Leica, but with a rangefinder--an old Bolsey, and probably a flashbulb and a correcting filter (dunno if they had blue bulbs back then). I like VueScan. It's not your usual GUI, but the results are quite nice! - --Peter Klein Seattle, WA