Repairing damage to your slides
Once digitised, you can use image editing software to correct damage and even adjust exposure and focus, just like you would with a photo taken with a digital camera. As with all things photographic, you're faced with a vast choice of image editing software and options. In this article, we discuss considerations for software when used to edit an analogue-sourced archive of images.
Depending on your point of view, editing digital versions of slides and old photographs require less capabilities than many image editing software packages provide. Recognising that these photopgraphs were taken in analogue and have survived decades in non-digital format is part of the charm of the image as much as the subject and while it may be tempting to intervene and correct photographic errors, it will forever change the material essence of the image. We recommend a light-touch approach to conservation and to only use modern digital image editing software to restore photographs to their former condition.
With this in mind, when choosing image editing software, the key capabilities required are:
- Crop - scanned images will tend to capture a darker border from the frame of the scanned slide that should be removed from the digital version;
- Vignette - the ability to add vignette to a slide's image is often a simple tool to disguise water or light damage often occurring at the edge of a slide;
- Retouch - the ability to touch up minor light and water damage
- Tag - the ability to record additional information about the slide
Additional modern editing capabilities should be used with careful consideration:
- Exposure adjustment - if the image is under or over-exposed, correcting this can serve to bring out the subject more effectively;
- Colour adjustment - again to enhance the subject
- Sharpness adjustment - to correct minor issues with focus
Most of the entry-level image editing software offer the capabilities needed to repair damage to your collection with higher-end software offering capabilities that you are unlikely to require for these types of projects. It is all too easy, to over-process images with image editing tools and for historic image collections, we strongly advise as light a touch as possible.
The ability to "tag" an image provided by such software however provides a useful means of recording information often only held on the slide holder - such as date of processing or other information scribbled on by the photographer. Conserving this information with the digitised version provides a record for the image and enables discovery of the image through search. In our next article we discuss the options and steps to add digital tags to your images using the software available on your phone, PC or Mac.