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I've been working on a project to transfer 50 years of slides to a DVD.
Recently I got a new LCD Monitor and now many of my slides seem to have a speckled appearance in the dark areas that was not apparent on my old monitor. All of this is before any encoding for DVD.
All the slides are 35mm, mostly Kodachrome, which I scanned at 900bpi. I have saved them as Tif and imported them to PS (V 5.0). Mostly I adjusted them using Levels and brought the end points toward the center till they got to the point of significant info, I often adjusted them further by moving the mid slider. After that I often applied some Unsharp filter. Many of the problem slides may have been taken with a flash & therefor have a dark background.
Is there something different that I should do, or not do? Or am just trying for too much improvment?
Can you show as an image that needs an adjustment?
It doesn't need to be the complete picture; a part of it will do.
Until then I can't give you a real advice, since every problem asks for a different approach.
Here are before and after examples.
Interesting, that when I go back to originals, I now see that much of my problem may exist in the scanned image.
Which probably should change my question to is there a better way to scan? I was using an HP Photosmart S20, Usually whithout adjustment since I planned to do that later in PS.
[confused] halek, before I 'delve further' here, I'm looking at the images that you posted and one is tagged "after" so I'm assuming that is your corrected version. Is that so?
I just happen to notice that the 'after' image has more 'noise' than the original! Is it possible that you misnamed these files? [innocent]
I'm definitely going to wait to see what you are going to do with the original scanned slides. As you stated, I suspect that much of your problem may lay with how they were introduced to Photoshop.
Erik is the 'master' here when it comes to scanning material of this sort and I'm waiting for his response...
You have it correct, After is after I made adjustments using PS. But as I said in the beginning I was disappointed at the noise in the dark areas. I see however that some of that noise was there in my original scan.
I spent the afternoon running scans using different settings on the scanner. It appears that I can reduce the "dark noise" by increasing the brightness in the dark areas and using a slower scan. The resulting scan is a bit washed out, but when I adjust it in PS I feel that I see less "dark noise" than by starting with an unajusted scan at equal final quality.
The difference is not as dramatic as I was hoping for, but maybe that's all I can get considering the original.
Sometimes this works :
Duplicate the original twice.
Set one to screen mode (top) and the other to multiply.
Add a Hide All layer mask to both.
Paint in the highs(and lows) where you need them by revealing the corresponding layer with the mask.
I did a quick fiddle along the lines of what DB did, except with only the shadows.
Add Adjustment Layer > Levels.
Darken until noise mostly disappears.
Fill with black.
Paint in white over the shadows.
On top of that, I would have used a Curves Ad-Layer to brighten it up, but I didn't this time around.
Underexposed Slides 
I've been working on a project to transfer 50 years of slides to a DVD.
Linear Mode
