35mm slides

Topaz Products
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I am about to scan (using a photo scanner, not a flatbed) 130 2"x2" 35mm slides and would like your suggestions regarding a workflow with the Topaz AI apps. I also use Affinity Photo, Luminar 4, Aurora HDR 2019. The scanner camera is 14MP.

The slides appear to be in very good condition.

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My experience was with a large quantity of Kodachrome and Agfacolor 35mm slides which were nearly 50 years old. Unfortunately they hadn’t aged well.

There were two notable issues, the first being a buildup of dust, particularly on the emulsion side of the slides. I was using a scanner that had Level 3 FARE infrared cleaning technology which helped, but didn’t totally get rid of the problem. I would suggest giving the slides a brief and gently blow with a hand puffer, of the type used to clean DSLR sensors (not compressed air) to remove as much as you can before scanning.

The other issue was significant color casts, without much uniformity, so virtually each slide had to be post processed individually.

I scanned the slides at 3200 dpi with the export files being 48bit RGB TIFF

My workflow was

  1. Straighten and then crop the images in Affinity Photo. I used the resample mode so that all of the images were 4200 px x 2800px.
  2. Any corrections needed in exposure, white balance and clipped tones.
  3. I used Topaz Studio 1 as a plugin from Affinity and AI Clear from that. (I found that gave me better results than using Denoise AI (either mode).
  4. Whilst in Studio 1, I made what ever corrections I could for the color casts, and individual tweaks
  5. Back in Affinity, used the inpaint tool to remove any the dust spots that remained and then applied some final sharpening and then export.
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