Tag Archives: #how to improve a dark photo

Irish Rail at Sligo; Techniques for Improving a Dark Slide.

Scaled, but otherwise unadjusted scan.

On April 23, 2000, I exposed this view of Irish Rail 072 with Mark 2s at Sligo.

It was a typical overcast Irish day.

Working with Fujichrome Sensia II (ISO 100), my result was a slightly underexposed colour slide, common with these unflattering lighting conditions.

To improve the photograph, I scanned the original slide at very high resolution (4000 dpi) using a Nikon Super Coolscan5000 digital scanner and outputted the file as a hi-res TIF.

I then imported the TIF into Lightroom and made a few minor changes to contrast, colour balance, and exposure that I feel make for a much-improved photograph.

Adjusted scan.

While I can output the adjusted file as a TIF, the resulting file size is much too large for presentation on this site. Instead, I’ve made a pair of low-res JPG’s specifically sized for internet presentation here. One is scaled from the un-adjusted original scan, the other is my improved scan.

Tracking the Light Posts Daily.

Contrast and density tweaked for internet viewing on social media.