AV News 177 - August 2009
With a view of reminding him of his previous good times I decided to convert
the original AV show from Slide to Digital so that he could see it on TV or by
using a projector.
In order to convert the slides to digital I used my Nikon Super Coolscan 4000
slide scanner which is otherwise little used these days. The process of
scanning the slides is a slow one, but by scanning say 10 slides a night the task
was soon completed. To ensure the slide scanner produces accurate results,
I produced a test slide of a correctly exposed colour chart and then spent some
time calibrating the scanner to give a good rendition of the test chart and saving
the colour settings relative to the type of slide that had been used. The Nikon
Scanner has a facility for producing multi scans (going over the slide several
times) in order to produce a higher quality of output. However this process
takes a long time and as we are producing output to 1024 x 768 pixels there is
no benefit wasting time producing the higher quality output.
By scanning the slides it enabled me to improve them in several ways such
as: cropping, levels, curves etc. using Photoshop. Many of the scenes in Nepal
were of snow covered mountains, were the snow used up the top 2/3s of the
image. A correct exposure for the snow meant the foreground was found to be
darker than required. To overcome this dark foreground I used a simulated
Neutral Density Graduated Filter in Photoshop giving the image a better overall
exposure. This technique may be found on the following web site:
http://www.loserlabeled.com/tutorials/ndgrad.shtml
Original Image - Pun Hill at Dawn
With Neutral Density Graduated Filter
The original music for the AV was produced from LPs and recorded to audio
cassette with the two pieces of music used being simply butted together. For
the Digital AV I was able to download the music from CDs using Adobe
Audition, Cool Edit etc giving improved sound quality and joining the two
pieces of music with cross fades producing smoother transitions. The AV was
then produced to DVD for watching on TV or projector.
The final result was very pleasing to both myself and David, bringing back
very happy memories. Many of you like me have boxes of Slide AVs just
waiting to be converted, so don't hesitate because it is worth the effort, so get
scanning!
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