AV News 195 - February 2014
The Making of Cambridge Remembered
by Malcolm Gee LRPS DPAGB & Jenny Gee DPAGB
After attending the 2010 RPS International Audio Visual Festival in Cirencester,
our first major AV event, we drove home to Norfolk. During the journey, we
began to speculate whether we could put together a retrospective AV sequence
without using third party images. Our thoughts turned to an 18-month period we
had spent in Cambridge together during the late 1960s. At that time, Malcolm
was working there, and at the weekends we explored the city; on one
memorable Saturday we got engaged! Looking thorough our extensive library of
colour transparencies, we found that we had around 530 35mm half-frame
slides, taken on Kodachrome II (ISO 25) or Kodak Ektachrome X (ISO 64) film,
using Olympus Pen F and Pen S cameras, which could form the basis of a
sequence.
The slides were given a nominal pre-sort in their storage wallets, and then laid
out on a large light box, to determine a preliminary running order. On examining
the slides, it was found that there were residues of fungal growth on some of
them, although they had been carefully stored for over 45 years. They were all
therefore cleaned using PEC-12 Archival Photographic Emulsion Cleaner.
Subsequently, they were scanned into digital format using a Nikon Super
Coolscan 9000ED film scanner, with all the optional software image
enhancement adjustments turned off. As both Kodakchome II and Ektachrome
X slides were scanned, the scanner was profiled using a Kodak Ektachrome IT.8
target slide, and all the scanned Ektachrome slides had this profile applied to
them. The Nikon Scan 4 scanning software has a specific option that is selected
when you scan Kodachrome slides, and therefore they were not profiled. By
default the scanned digital files opened directly into Adobe Photoshop, and a
number of adjustments were carried out on them.
The Levels command was used to remove any colour casts that had
developed over time, and to adjust the images to a common neutral colour
balance. To aid this process the computer monitor was regularly profiled using
a ColorVision Spyder2PRO. As scanned colour transparencies tend to produce
an image scan that has a very high contrast, the Shadows/Highlights command
was used to lighten the intense dark shadows and slightly darken the very bright
whites. The Clone Stamp Tool was used to eliminate any artifacts in the digital
images, caused by dust on the original slides.
In the architectural images, any distortion of the vertical perspective was
corrected using the Edit>Transform>Perspective command. Using the Crop
Tool, the image files were then reduced down to 1400 x 934 pixels in size, to give
a 3 by 2 format. When mounted for projection, a half-frame transparency has an
effective image size of 23 x 17mm. This does present quite a challenge, when
you consider that at the Great Northern Festival, the digital images were
projected onto a screen just over 10 feet (3048mm) wide! This means the
original image was enlarged, on projection, by a factor of at least 132-fold, and
in some cases, on cropped images, up to 180-fold. To reduce the appearance
of the grain in the original film emulsion in the projected digital images, they were
all processed using the Photoshop plug-in Topaz DeNoise.
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