Digital ROC
Digital Recovery of Color (ROC) is designed to cope with faded negatives and slides.
I think the theory is that the people who developed the capability reckon they have a better idea of how to restore faded source materials than anybody apart from an expert in color manipulation.
I've had three situations where ROC has proved useful:
Some classic faded negatives from the 1960s
Some less classically faded negatives from the 1980s
Kodachrome slides (from any era)The first negatives represented some long forgotten brand of colour negatives from about 1969. The negatives had turned green (!) Scans taken from them looked strongly magenta. At least one of the major colours had clearly faded drastically.
Impressively, ROC succeeded in restoring the colour of these negatives almost completely. Well done Digital ROC. Until that moment I had supposed that these negatives would have to be converted to black and white to provide usable images.
The next negatives were Fujicolor negatives from my 21st Birthday party in 1985. Now, I don't regard this as ancient history, but the negatives tell another story. For some reason it's had to get a neutral colour across the negatives. The bulk of the images (excluding the edges) seem to have been stained a light tea coloured brown.
Digital ROC didn't help much with these negatives.
Finally, scans of Kodachrome slides often seem to be very bluish in colour. It's not clear why this is the case: possibly it's a way of compensating for the colour of slide projector bulbs.
Setting a small Digital ROC correction (eg 1) will transform many (but not all) Kodachrome slides from rather flat (and very blue) images to ones that match the original much better.
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