Tag Archives: #Swift River Bridge

photography, Tips and Technique

Photo Freight Crossing the Swift River—Slide Scan

Among the hundreds of 35mm slides returned to me from the processing lab the other day was this Kodak Ektachrome E100 slide of Conway Scenic Railroad 573 and 4266 leading the 2020 Railfan’s Day photo freight that I helped organize.

September 5, 2020 was a perfect clear day with rich blue sky and warm late-summer sun. 

In addition to a great number of digital photographs, I also exposed color slides for slide shows and to keep for posterity.

With slides I get the best of both worlds; analog archival material and a scannable transparency that is easily digitized for internet presentation.

I scanned the slide using a Nikon Super Coolscan5000 scanner, set to 4000 dpi and a ‘White Balance’ color profile.

Below I’ve attached the VueScan control window that shows my various manual settings; the RAW uninterpreted scan of the slide, and the adjusted scan after I altered shadow and highlight contrast and other parameters in Adobe Lightroom.

Hamrick Software’s VueScan work window.

E100 slide, ISO 100 exposed with a Canon EOS3 with 40mm pancake lens. This the un-adjusted scan file. Except for scaling, I made no changes to the slide image.

Adjusted scan; shadow areas were lightened, highlights were lowered, edges of the image were cropped. Plus fine adjustments to color temperature and color balance.

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