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A Smile From the Past
15 April 2024
In an old Kodak box labeled Lantern Slide Cover Glass we found a single glass positive. It was intended to be viewed by a Magic Lantern, predecessor of the slide projector. But you can just hold the 4.0 x 3.24 inch slides up to the light.
A Lantern Slide. What mystery did it hold?.
And, if you have a smartphone, Bob's your grandmother. Or was in our case.
It was not our grandmother's idea of a good time to have her photo taken. So we suspect it wasn't her idea.
In our forensic imagination, the staff photographer on the magazine Dad edited would have offered to make the image. And Dad would have gratefully accepted having a professional color photo of his mother.
He kept it by his shoe polishing kit in the closet. Which is where we found it 47 years after her passing and 19 after his.
We tried copying it with our iPhone 15 Pro Max on our light table but we couldn't avoid a reflection of the camera even if we backed away (which usuallyw works). The light table was lighting us up, too.
So we resorted to our CanoScan 9000F which has a mask just large enough for the slide. The gap between the slide and the scanner glass turned out not to be a problem for the CanoScan.
It delivered a nice color image with all the defects of hand processing clearly visible. We spent a little time with the Healing Brush in Photoshop and more time color correcting it, handling the background separately.
Still, there was something that bothered us about it. A distortion introduced by the lens, which we suspect (given the technology of the day) was closer to a wide normal than a telephoto. So we used Photoshop's Lens Distortion filter to back away a bit. And that helped.
It's still a work in progress, though. Skin tones are the challenge now.*
But as the earliest color photograph of her, it's worth the time. By the time color photography was common she, who was born in 1895, would no longer have been young. But still young enough to smile.
Update (24 April): We took our own advice again to improve the skin tones. Which was to use Photoshop's neural Colorize filter. But this is the first time we've done it on a color image without converting it to black-and-white first. So the filter had some color data to work with. And it did a nice job, as the rollover above shows.
