Salvaging Faded Ektachrome Slides

1957 Ektachrome booklet (courtesy of Mr. Maurice Fisher at Photographic Memorabilia)

Eastman Kodak introduced Ektachrome transparency film in sheet film format in 1946. The big advantage of Ektachrome over the famous Kodachrome was the former could be developed at local laboratories or even at home. In Ektachrome, the color couplers were included in the emulsion and processing required only one color developer. Kodachrome required a major laboratory operation for developing, and this meant a turnaround time of several days for most users. 

The film that my dad used in 1959 would have been the version that required the E-2 Process or the Improved E-2 Process. The film speed was probably 32 ASA. His slide mounts have the same blue pattern as the example on the cover of the Kodak booklet. The text on the slide mount is in English, but I do not know where he had them processed. Were there color photo labs in Rangoon at the time?

The big failing of early Ektachrome was that colors faded. Most 1950s and 1960s Ektachrome slides are now a red mess. Image data is there, but much of the color information has been lost. In the days before Photoshop or other sophisticated software packages, there was not much you could do with one of these faded slides. I threw out hundreds of family slides decades ago when my wife and I sorted my dad's archives. 

Let us look at one example from Rangoon, Burma, from 1958 or 1959. I scanned the slide on a Plustek 7600i film scanner using Silverfast software via a Mac mini computer with the BigSur 11.7.4 operating system. The original slide shows the characteristic red color shift. You see the same with Anscochrome slides from the 1960s. 

Standing on a furniture box that came from Hong King

This is the scan on "Auto" mode as a 48-bit TIFF file (16 bits for each color). There does not appear to be much useful color data left. (I have resized for this article but not changed color).

This is the "Portrait" mode in Silverfast. I am amazed how well it did with no more intervention on my part. The software is doing some clever work in the background.

This is a 16 bit monochrome scan. This does not look too bad and demonstrates that there is still image data on this media. In another 64 years, will there be retrievable image data on our digital storage media or on our accounts in the "cloud"? Sorry I keep asking this, but you readers know the answer.

Photoshop's automatic color correction tool did not work well on a slide this badly shifted. The grey dropper also did not work. On the Photrio forum, experienced Photoshop users said the best way to correct a faded slide was to use the curves tool manually. I moved the curve to the extents of the color data and adjusted the amplitude. The example above is or the blue channel. I am far from a sophisticated Photoshop user but did the best I could in CS5. The result is slightly different than the Silverfast "Portrait" scan, neither better or worse. 

Summary:  There is some recoverable color data in old faded Ektachrome slides. And a conversion to monochrome can look surprisingly good. Maybe future software will be more sophisticated, but I have not seen many (or any?) new scanners in the last decade. But we can always hope for software development.