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How to Fix 35mm Slides That Have Gotten Dark

For years, 35mm slide film was used by professional and amateur photographers who were looking for accurate color reproduction. Slide film was known for how accurately it would capture the scene you were photographing. With 35mm slides being both the original and final copy (unlike a film negative that you can reprint if the print starts to fade) when a slide begins to fade the detail is lost. Digital technology now affords photographers the opportunity to fix dark, faded 35mm slides by scanning them into digital files and using a photo editing program to fix the image.

Instructions

- 1
  Turn on your home computer and dedicated film scanner. Prepare your slides for scanning by carefully cleaning them with an anti-static cloth. This cloth will remove the dust on the slide and help prevent any dust from collecting on the slide during the scanning process.
- 2
  Place the slides into the scanner's carrier tray. Insert the tray into the scanner and commence the scan by pressing "Start." Save the scanned 35mm slides to a folder.
- 3
  Open the file for the faded 35mm slide in the digital editing program of your choice. Adobe's Photoshop is a powerful program that will handle this job, and there are open source versions from GIMP and Paint.Net that will also work.
- 4
  Press and hold "Ctrl" and "L" to bring up the sliders to fix "Levels," and "Ctrl" and numbers 2 to 6 for the different channels in "Curves." If your slide has not faded too much you may be able to achieve a good final version with these steps.
- 5
  Use the "Magic Wand" selector tool from the left margin to select portions of the scanned image, and work on selected portions of the image one at a time to bring the quality back to each portion of the picture. This may take some time, but once done you will have a copy of the slide that will not fade.

Photography