Mavimao said:

Oh wow! That's incredible! What's the wizardry behind this?? (But seriously how did you extract so much more color?)

Basically understanding the colour science, having a densitomer and analysing the print to work out what spectra of light to feed it to try and ger the most out of the print.

The old scan was done with a white light source, and although it used a higher resolution Bayer UHD 10bit sensor, with that amount of fade, the magenta is going to overpower everything else and not enough of the other colours will come through. Also, the white light source used is not quite full spectrum, there are notches which result in some colour frequencies being lost. Not much of an issue on a good print, but on a faded one you want every last drop of colour you can find.

I'm using a controlled light source that has two different blues, two different reds and one green, and you can adjust the mix accordingly, to either get full spectrum white light, or anything in between. The sensor is lower resolution, but is 16bit, and has excellent quantum efiiciency with a really good dynamic range. The results aren't perfect, but I think they will be better than the white-light based scan, and hopefully some of you can make them even better by doing a grade.

Also, the film is quite dirty, I am giving it as good a clean as I dare.

The shots above are some of the better ones, others don't fare quite as well, but hopefully the time and shipping expense will be worth it. I'll punch out a low res preview from the test scan. There was some crap caught in the 'gate' and focus isn't perfect, but it was a quick test to see if the rescan is worthwhile.

Having said all that, it may turn out no better than the white-light scan done in the US, sometimes the colour just isn't there to gain.

If people think it is an improvement that is worthwhile, then I will go ahead with doing it.