I recently had some of my old astrophoto slides scanned with a Noritsu slide scanner so I can put them into permanent storage and finally move into 100% digital photography. I’ve learned a lot about image processing and the tools are much better now than they were when I originally took the photos.

There are three major changes that affect the quality:

• The slide scanner is much better (although the lab gave me JPG files instead of 16bit TIFF files, what the hell?)
• My monitors are color managed now that I’m using a Mac. However, this doesn’t help Windows users who maybe have wacko calibration.
• The noise reduction software is much better. I’m using Noise Ninja on most of the film photos.

I re-stacked and processed them to see what kind of quality I could get. Here are some of the results:

These were taken with either a standard Pentax 135mm lens or a Takahashi FS102 refractor telescope with a camera body attached to it. All were taken on slide film.

• Astrophotography
• G11
• Photography
• Takahashi