About these images

This collection of color slides consists mostly of family photos taken by Dwayne Nelson, from 1951–1993. Dwayne's son Byron was the caretaker of the slides for many years. When Byron died, the slides came into my possession and I embarked on a full-scale scanning and restoration project.

About the scans

All the slides were backlit with a Neewer RGB660 LED light source set to 4000K and scanned with a Fujifilm X-T4 fitted with an EL-Nikkor 50mm/2.8 lens, with three bracketed exposures for optimal shadow and highlight detail. No special care was given to dust and smudge removal beyond the judicious application of compressed air, so some dust may be present in the scans.

I used Darktable to merge the bracketed exposures to HDR, then applied extensive exposure and color balance corrections to do my best to reverse the decades of fading. The photos were then converted to high-quality sRGB JPEG images, organized and metatagged in DigiKam, and uploaded to this Piwigo gallery. The full collection of full-resolution JPEG imaged can be downloaded here.

Why are some of the colors so strange?

Color photographs—both slides and prints—are highly unstable. The cyan dyes used in Ektachrome and Agfachrome films are particularly volatile and have suffered extensive fading in the original slides. I did my best to rescue the blues and greens in these slides… to mixed results. I didn't use any AI or manual colorization techniques on these images because such methods artificially recolor the images rather than restoring the colors present in the originals. So although the colors in some of these slides may look odd, they do at least bear a passing acquaintance with the true colors originally captured by the slides.

A number of the slides in this collection are Kodachromes, which have fared much better with age and required significantly less aggressive restoration.