Recovery of 35mm Slides

This page is still under construction. More content to come!

Part of the fun in compiling this website is to recall my photographic experiences over many decades. This page is about the era of 35mm film photography. I reckon that is about 1970 to 1990, during most of which time I used what I recall was a Minolta SRT101 SLR (or similar, the camera is long gone), and my film of choice was Kodak Ektachrome. I went that way and shunned Kodachrome because I couldn't conceive of having so many negatives printed and then stored in dusty, musty photo albums. Somehow, it felt preferable to invest in a slide projector and accumulate countless thousands of slides in circular carousels (which must have taken up as much room as the rejected albums!).

In 2019, retired from professional life, I embarked on a huge project to digitise all these slides. The main objective was to get rid of them physically and free up space. I even managed to sell the empty carousels on eBay! The slides were fed through a scanner, one by one, like a sausage machine. Speed mattered more than care and precision. The results reflected that — soft focus, dust, hairs, scratches, and frequently a blue cast that made some subjects look like they had been relocated to Neptune. Up until now, I have never attempted to salvage any value from those masses of JPGs. My first foray into that deep pit was slides from my business assignment in Indonesia in 1980-81. This page is about the fun I had trying to turn those dusty relics into presentable images. To look at the results, go to Retrospective on Indonesia, 1980-81 which is in the Elsewhere section of this website.

Recovering the Past: the Unruly Help of Modern AI

My photographs from Indonesia were taken on a Minolta 35 mm SLR, shooting Ektachrome to produce slides capable of projection. Over the years, the slides survived, but not gracefully. They spent decades in storage that would make a museum curator faint, and by the time I digitised them in 2019, they were part of a massive project: literally thousands of 35 mm slides dating back to the 1960's

Only recently did I return to the Indonesia scans and decide to salvage the best of them. This time, I turned to AI. Over several days I bounced between ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, partly because I was using free plans and kept hitting quotas, and partly because each system had its own quirks. I asked for the same things every time: remove the blemishes and the blue cast; render the image with subtle oil‑painting brush strokes; don’t crop anything; keep my aspect ratio; add a small “Ai” signature bottom‑right instead of a billboard‑sized “Made with AI” badge; and adjust faces so they were unrecognisable without turning them into pixelated crime‑scene mosaics.

In theory, simple. In practice, a comedy.

Every AI forgot something. One would crop when told not to. Another would ignore the oil‑painting request entirely. Another would slap a giant badge in the corner like a toddler with a sticker book. And none of them could remember what I’d told them five minutes earlier. AI agents, it seems, have the attention span of a caffeinated goldfish. I would say "don’t crop,"" and they would nod politely and immediately crop. I would say “small Ai logo bottom right,” and they would produce a logo the size of Sumatra. I would say "don’t change the aspect ratio," and they would change it with the confidence of a trainee barista steaming milk.

After wrestling with this for days, I decided to stop fighting it. Instead of forcing uniformity, I’m making the inconsistency a feature — a reflection of the unpredictable, sometimes maddening, sometimes magical nature of AI‑assisted restoration. If the images vary in style, tone, or brushstroke, so be it. They’ve survived fifty years; they can survive a little AI mischief.

I should say here that using three different AI agents has been insightful. The experience uploading "before" versions is more or less the same for each agent, but they do differ in how they respond. I have my views as to the varying "quality" of the agents' enhancements. (I am not going to name agents in any of these comparisons - how embarrassing it would be to be flamed or sued by an AI company!) One agent kept repeating the specifications until I explicitly said "go ahead", while others just did it. One agent was absolutely incapable of removing the unsightly "Made with AI" badge, even after I pointed out that it had successfully done so on an earlier test run. Agents' understanding of "oil painting brush strokes" seem to vary. Etc etc.

All AI's I used performed brilliant enhancements - its mostly their inconsistency complaining about, but also their tendency to create and modernise. I reckon I could achieve equal results by making adjustments myself in Adobe LIghtroom, and I can stem the generative urge, but one thing is certain. Artificial Intelligence works faster than my humble Native Intelligence.

I am writing this having just completed Indonesia in 1980, and it has been a strange journey of recovering old memories forty‑plus years later with tools that are brilliant, flawed, forgetful, and occasionally inspired. It's photography, but with a modern twist: the past as it was, and the past as technology now tries — and sometimes fails — to remember it.

The splash image at the top of this page is just one example of the good and the bad from AI enhancements of images. For this demonstration, I chose a drearily lit 1976 image of the Colosseum in Rome. Note that annoying "Made with AI" badge at the top right of the AI enhanced version. The enhancement is brilliant - just look how more vivid the image is! But look closely and you'll see that the agent has been creative too, and changed details. I think agents cannot resist updating an image to approximate the present state of the subject, despite me being clear that I want it to portray the state as it was 50 years ago. Only once or twice did I return an enhancement to try to insist on historical accuracy. But I failed. I now believe the only way to stop AI being creative, is to do it yourself in Lightroom and Photoshop.