CVN-71 USS Theodore R Roosevelt back in'96

[bvdbogaert]

Scanned some slides of a visit to the Roosevelt at the 2nd day of Christmas back in '96. She was moored outside Cannes.
A nightly car trip to southern France brought us to the harbour where we were picked up early morning with a boat that took us to the carrier.

CVN-71 #2 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

We had an F-14 RIO as tour guide. After a long stroll through the ship we ended up at the Air boss' seat. Great view;
CVN-67 USS Theodore Roosevelt #2 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

This slide took some tweaking as it was very dark, probably had to do with the early hour of day and the use of Kodachrome 64 slide roll that was rather poor in all kinds of circumstances, let alone low light. So maybe the colour is a bit off, but I still like the shot
F-14 #2 CVN-67 USS Theodore Roosevelt 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

The deck was absolutely crammed with aircraft, well it was mostly about serial back in the day anyway, but getting a complete ac on a slide wasn't easy. Furthermore our RIO didn't really want to spent hours outside as it was windy and cold. Obviously we needed to see it all and we did kind of a self guided tour, managed to bag a couple while at it.
CVN-71 S-3B 160600_AC-704 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

CVN-71 S-3B 160606_AC-706 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

CVN-71 160122_AC-700 S-3B 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

CVN-71 161550_AC-603 E-2C 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

CVN-71 164239_AC-403 FA-18C 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

CVN-71 EA-6B 163402_AC-621 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

CVN-71 164261_AC-401 FA-18C 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

No matter what kind of strange hobby you might be pursuing (please enjoy it), it doesn't get any better than F-14's on a ship;
CVN-71 160900_AC-106 F-14A 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

CVN-71 162697_AC-103 F-14A 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

CVN-71 160406_AC-106 F-14A 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

CVN-71 161135_AC-115 F-14A 199612261500 by Bart van den Bogaert, on Flickr

Great memories

[Nighthawke]

Never mind the colours these are fabulous. What a treat to be on board a CVN! That head-on Tomcat is menacing but beautiful at the same time. Many thanks for posting this.

[paddyboy]

Superb set, Bart

Up close and personal with Tomcats in their natural environment

Thanks for posting

Paddyboy

[matt e]

Nice set especially #3

[Blue Diamond]

anything with Tomcats in gets my vote so thanks for sharing.

[SW Sky Blue]

Excellent

[Stratocruiser]

Splendiferous!
Thanks for this most excellent post

[3Greens]

Just brilliant Bart
Never had the opportunity to get up close to a USS flat top

Thanks very much for posting

3Greens

[Legoman2]

Thank you for bringen back the memory of this visit

[bvdbogaert]

Thanks for the kind words gents

[KeBul]

Superb set, very nice indeed.

Thanks for sharing.

Hope you don't mind, I tweaked your favourite... if it's a problem let me know and I'll take it down.

Kev

[bvdbogaert]

Superb set, very nice indeed.

Thanks for sharing.

Hope you don't mind, I tweaked your favourite... if it's a problem let me know and I'll take it down.

Kev

Do I mind? No I love it, much better.
Would you be so kind to share your workflow on this one?

Regards,

Bart

[KeBul]

Do I mind? No I love it, much better.
Would you be so kind to share your workflow on this one?

Regards,

Bart

I don't have a specific workflow per se, just a series of self taught tweaks that I play around with until I get closer to how I think it should look...

I'm sure there are other methods/tricks to do some of this, no doubt some would be better, but this is how I'm doing it at the moment, some work and some don't it depends on the individual scan so I would be doing lots of undo's or stepping back through history when something doesn't work, plus copies of layers to preserve changes or allow for masking.

I've never found a "single' step by step process that works on every scan, which unfortunately makes it hard to share any such a workflow - or as it should be called a 'haphazard' or 'luck' flow.

Case in point is this one, I did it once, just as an exercise, didn't save it. Then spotted your comment on it being a favourite, so decided to post my improved version, but couldn't quickly get it back to where I thought I'd got it - lots more playing around and finally ended up happy with the one I posted... now I'm trying to reproduce it again to give you a specific workflow but so far not been able to get anywhere close! Sorry.

I use Photoshop, and these are the areas I play around with, obviously this will only help if you are familiar with PS

First of all a few obvious things to try;
Auto tone
Auto contrast
Auto colour
Auto Levels
See if any of those improve things.

On my own scans of mainly Kodachrome 64 I've found end results are always better if I can then sort of the colour balance of the shadows and highlights... ideally prior to actual scanning or afterwards in PS, so use the colour sampler to check for a cast or imbalance in a suitable black (tyres in shadow are good) and white (look for a white that isn't blown (i.e. has RGB values below 255, 255, 255) and correct them/balance them so that the R,G,B values are close (eg a black area = 11, 12, 14 would be OK), usually do this in levels in both scanner software or PS.
As an added bonus if you can find a suitable mid point of grey (can more difficult than it sounds) then again balancing that at an early stage can help a lot.
Scans often have a fair bit of colour noise so it's easy to pick up a false reading from a single noisy pixel, so move your pointer around a little bit to get a better feel for it's average colour balance.
So for example, if your shadows or blacks have a red cast then in levels select the Red channel and ease the blacks slider to the right until the colour sampler shows a roughly equal number for red, green and blue

If there's a general colour cast and non of the "Autos" help then adjusting the colour balance can improve It, use the sliders to ease back the colours that are causing the cast, don't forget in colour balance you can select and adjust highlights, midtones and shadows or use Levels on a per channel basis and be patient and gentle with the corrections on the sliders - too heavy handed and you'll soon loose your way completely.

Another trick I use is reducing colour specific saturation, if you have a horrible cast or colours you can't get rid of, then try desaturating that specific colour, works really well for grey aircraft because grey is grey in black and white and by reducing the saturation of some colours you are heading towards creating a black and white picture, key is is use layers to allow you to mask back in colours where you need them, example on your Tomcats is yellow, I had a horrible yellow/green cast on the flight deck, so new layer via copy, then on that layer reduce the saturation for yellow and green until the deck had a better black tarmac tone about it and then used masking and a brush to paint the bright yellows back through from the layer below - yellow names, below the canopy and stripes on the tail fins and yellow lines on the deck and tow frame.
This technique is good for getting rid of colour casts in sky when the rest of picture is good, so say for a red cast in the sky, reduce the saturation of red (Adjustments... Hue/Saturation).

For exposure I use one or more of Adjustments - Levels, Exposure and/or shadows/highlights.

Sorry I cannot be more specific than that... edit...

I've tried a run through on a different shot to demonstrate some of these techniques... next post.

Kev

[KeBul]

Hi, an example of the sort of work flow using the techniques previously outlined...

Gonna use the head-on tomcat shot, coz it's another belter.

Initial issue is the slight red/magneta cast especially in the dark/shadow areas, sampling the RGB values for the black tyre we can see there's a definite lean towards the reds: R:57 G:13 B:10



In this case we'll fix this with levels, looking at the individual Red/Green/Blue channels in Levels you can see the Red channel is somewhat compressed and isn't spread across the full width of the histogram



So we'll need to move the shadows/blacks pointer across to re-align it where the reds start



You can now see the red colour cast has gone and the RGB values taken from the same tyre are now (or will be when the setting is saved) R:12 G:13 B:10 that's close enough.

Next step is to try and improve the exposure, it's still pretty dark in the shadows, but as it's a scan the degree that it can be recovered will be limited (because the information just isn't there), however, a slight improvement can be achieved. First of all it's into Adjustments... Brightness/Contrast, and reduce the contrast as much as possible, in this case I took it right down to zero.
Then it's back into levels to actual try and boost the exposure and shadows, this time using the RGB combined channel rather than individual channels.
Moving both the midtones point and the White point to the left a bit, will lift the picture...
What I am are watching for here as I adjust the midtones point is some funky effect on the deep blacks as the software "makes it up" on my screen I can just start to see this in the upper 2/3rds of the engine intakes.
For the white point I use the RGB values sampled on the brightest part of the sky, making sure I don't "blow out" the white too much which would show as lots of RGB values of 255,255,255



So now we have a slightly improved exposure, but can we do more?.. well just a little bit in Adjustments... Shadows/Highlights
The Shadows are on their limits of being pulled up, so 0 for shadows, but we can tame that sky back down again with 5-7% of highlight adjustment.



We are getting close now, but still have a slight red/magenta cast (see above), checking RGB values shows green tends to be a bit low and blue very fractionally high, so back into Levels to boost the midtones of green and drop the midtones of blue a bit and as you can see the RGB values of a sample from the deck that were R:95 G:84 B:108 become R:95 G:94 B:95 - Close enough!



Next try and get rid if the slight funk introduced to the blacks earlier, mainly in the engine intakes, but there's also some below the aircraft, for this I'll use the saturation reduction technique, on yellow and green - getting rid of the more prominent yellow with a greater desaturation setting. looks much better now.



Here's a 50/50 before and after.



and the final finished image, after a layer copy a boost of saturation and some masking to bring back some colour just to the buckets, sea, yellow pole on the deck and distant town



Hope this helps

Kev

[KeBul]

I wanted to show something of a workflow using the techniques in my previous post, so dived into using levels etc...

But to prove my original point, of trying various things and seeing how it goes here's another version that only took a couple of minutes to do...

Auto Colour
Auto levels
Shadow highlights - 5% of each
The previously used trick of desaturating yellows and greens

and this was the result:



Not too shabby and much much easier, I reckon this will work on most your shots with the slight red cast.

Kev

[bvdbogaert]

Thanks a million for the extensive reply Kev. I will certainly use that to rework this series of scans. I found a workflow on the internet using Ai to correct colours and that showed some really good result, but I am still working on CS6 ( yeah I know) so that is not an option.

I will repost once happy with what I got.

Thanks again

[capercaillie]

A great tour when there was still some variety on the deck, an ES-3A included. Always good to see.

Puzzled by the KR64 was poor in all circumstances though? One of the best slide films ever produced and often the medium of all those superb colour books of hi viz US aircraft in the 60s and 70s.

[KeBul]

Puzzled by the KR64 was poor in all circumstances though? One of the best slide films ever produced and often the medium of all those superb colour books of hi viz US aircraft in the 60s and 70s.

I think it is because Kodachrome was a very special film, effectively multiple layers of black and white, each layer tinted to build up the colours, so a really dense emulsion that scanners struggle with, in my experience scanning it, if the exposure is very good and there's plenty of colours to work from then the scanning software can work it out and provide a decent scan straight off, the less colour in the shot and/or any underexposure and results can be hit and miss from home scanners.

I suspect professional drum scanners and their software were more capable of handling KR and were probably used for such publications.

Kev

[bvdbogaert]

The KR64 was good in good (loads of sun) light. In our northern European circumstances the lack of ISO didn't really help. Getting a decent shutter speed in combination with a apparature that was at the lens' sweet spot often proved hard during long periods of the year imho. But as a teenager/student it was a relatively cheap solution that I used for years.