Old colour photos from space

[Erik Petersson]

Dear all,

today I got a nice gift, a number of colour and b/w satellite photos (prints) that are around 30 years old or older. They b/w look fine, but the colour ones have a strong red tint. The black sky has become rather reddish. The colour photos could probably be scanned and restored. Could anyone help me to information on how to do this?

Thanks a lot in ahead
Erik

 

[Photo Engineer]

Erik;

I too have a few color photos from that era posted in my gallery.

I have a restore button on my scanner software that does this job nicely, but I rarely use it. My photos are in rather good condition.

Most of the photos from that era were lost and they have set up a project at the University of Central Florida to restore or recover as many photos as possible. There is also an effort on the west coast that is doing the same.

PE

 

[Erik Petersson]

Your photos are just beuatiful. Those that I got are Soviet, and probably from the 70-ies, probably rare.

Good to hear that this might be solved already at scanning. Must try this soon.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Erik;

Thanks. I was director of still photography there for 1.5 years.

The problem is that Soviet color film fades much more than US color films from the same era, and that may present a problem. I wish you the best of luck in restoring these.

I might add that the sharpness and grain will not be great either.

PE

 

[Erik Petersson]

Well, sharpness is quite bad. The photos are 20 x 20 cm, but they might look better if sized down. The best one shows a Souys shuttle hovering over the earth.

Thanks for helping me out with this. I will post the photo after scanning. But this might not be soon on second thoughts as I currently am somewhere in Central Asia.

 

[Oscans]

Using a scanner

You may be surprised as to how easy this could be.

A fairly ordinary flat bed scanner does a good job of getting the information off the paper. Rarely use more than 600 dpi.

Then use Photoshop with "Autolevels".

We bulk scan thousands of photos, prints, slides and negatives, and Autolevels has a great ability for quick & dirty restoration.

We have seen many reddish prints come back to life.