Hare Krishna

I've been working up the energy to rescan and reprocess a bunch of film from the very late sixties through the early seventies that I originally scanned on an Epson V500. I didn't really know what I was doing and the scans were barely passable. Then a friend loaned me his Nikon scanner and suggested I get Vuescan since Nikon no longer supported their own product and its software. The scans were enough better that I bought my own Nikon scanner and never looked back. The scans made this way were, with not too much trouble, capable of making better prints than I made in the darkroom back in the day.

Needless to say, these old negatives are not in as good shape as I would like. They were stored in glassine sleeves, some of which had slowly changed color over the years. There were embedded dust, fine scratches, chemical stains, and the occasional insect and mold.

I have yet to find any software that made dealing with these issues easy. Ctein's book, "Digital Restoration From Start To Finish," has been a big help. He recommends Akvas's Restoration software, among other programs. This is similar, sorta, to Photoshop's repair tool. Akvas offered both a 10-day free trial and a Senior discount, for which I qualify, so I downloaded the trial version and bought it a few days later. I've been playing with it for the past few days. So far so good.

This brings me to this image shot in 1970. These Hare Krishna singers and dancers were on the National Mall not too far from the Ellipse during a large anti-war demonstration. If you embiggen it, you can see that the left side is really soft. (The right side was, too, but I cropped that.) What you won't see are all the dust and scratches that I removed with the Akvas software. This took about six hours, which is about the same amount of time it would have taken using Photoshop's tool, but there were fewer artifacts and I did not have to rely on cloning.

I finished this after the Eagles' game tonight at about 1 AM, and I was not really happy with the result, so I started playing around to see if I could at least make it a bit more interesting. I put boxes around those faces that were complete enough to recognize, one color for the Hare Krishna and another for the onlookers. I spotted an M series Leica (probably an M-3 or M-4) and another rangefinder that I cannot identify for certain, so I put boxes around those, too. That which is in the boxes is exposure corrected B&W. Outside the boxes is false color, mostly red.

Next time, if there is a next time for the face boxes, they won't be as heavy.