I tend to be significantly less technical than many of the other users who contribute to this forum. But I have had success just using the Auto Color Correctioin enhancement. At least, for me, it produced acceptable results.
Auto Color or Auto Levels (works about half the time).
Or for more control, use Levels, click on area for black, white, or gray (or a combination of all three).
Or use Color Balance.
Or use Variations if you want to see a progressive color tweaking representation.
Once you find a way to get the color balance you want, if all the files are the same, you could record an action and play it on all of them at once to make the changes automagically.
Mac
As I’m in the midst of scanning in a similar bunch of slides, I can say ‘Yes’ to the color correction question. Two things you can try in Elements:
First, try using Enhance>Color>Color Cast. This allows you to find a an object that should be white, gray or black, use it as a reference point and adjust the rest of the picture similarly. This works by itself about 25% of the time.
Second, try adding a Levels adjustment layer. You can adjust the individual channels using the drop down box. This usually takes care of another 50% for me.
Finally, I have a neat plugin called Digital ROC (Recovery of Color) from an outfit in Texas recently bought out by Kodak that is for just this problem. In one step it does a great job on the remaining 25% of slides I can’t seem to get just right using the built-in tools.
There are also some tools out there that allow you to do things similar to the Channel Mixer in PS. For some reason I do not find that as useful.
Bob Warren
Oops. Got my forums mixed up.
Forget the "Color Balance" and "action" mentions in my last post. That’s in Photoshop.
Mac
I have been doing a similar project for several years. Then I discovered PSE last year! Each individual slide is a challenge, you have to do each one by itself to get it right. I have many underwater slides, many travel pictures under different lighting conditions, and they all need to be scanned in and corrected. But if we have PSE, we can do it! Very time consuming, but we can resurrect some of the real old ones and faded ones.
What a project, and there are a lot of people who are doing this now, as the technology is improving.
Time consuming is the word, but it is fun.
Jane
Kodak Pictures – When I open my Kodak pictures in Elements they are all too red. How do I fix this problem? Thanks Susan
I had the same problem, and ended up purchasing a epson 3170 scanner. The program that they use corrected all the problems when the pictures were scanned. If any clean up had to be done then I used elements. Problem solved
Chuck B
