What Colour is Snow?

This week we've been grinding our way through a set of images supplied by a long-standing client. He's very organised and every so often we get a chunk of his family photos. This week we got the holiday photos. A mixture of prints, slides and negatives.

The mix of holidays covers annual summer holidays, mainly to sunny beach locations plus many winter skiing trips. Final count was nearly 4,000 images. We had to use our Kodak s1220 for the print scanning, the Nikon 35mm slide scanner and our Epson V700 flatbed.

For the majority of images we got great results from all the material. The summer shots were pretty good, lots of deep blue sea and sandy beaches. The ski shots were much more difficult, and after a while we began to be fascinated by the variation in colour that we could see in snow. The Nikon scanner got the snow white the majority of times, on slides and negatives. Similarly the Epson was spot on, in no small measure due to the special snow scene setting in Silverfast.

But look at the prints - many of which were derived from the negatives we'd scanned. If the source was white right, I assume at one point the prints were too. Maybe it was poor washing or chemicals in processing, maybe it was the ravages of time (although the prints had been kept in their original paper wallets), but snow ranged from a light shade of grey through to a very mucky grey. Hardly any white snow.

If you've ever done any scanning you'll know this is a major problem. Sure, the correction is simple, you can normally rely on those one-click correct functions in iPhoto or Photoshop. The real problem is the variation in greys and the absolute volume of the task - we're talking hundreds of images to be corrected. It is in most circumstances a massive task.

Thankfully Kodak have a Retouch function, a one-click fix for any number of colour issues. Just hit the button and away goes the s1220 software busily bringing all the whites into line. So when the full project was finished and the files merged together as the client wanted we could see what colour snow really is, and it doesn't matter if the image came via negative, slide or print. Snow is white.