Excerpt from 2026 IAF paper:

"Ektachrome is famous for being a “punchy” film stock; however, the authors were surprised to find that during initial tests of the scanning hardware the camera was unable to capture the full range of luminance values contained in the emulsion. That is, the Sony ILX-LR1 whose sensor is rated for 14.5 stops was unable to capture all of the detail in the bright and dark spots. Interestingly it only seemed to occur for the more recent Ektachrome film stocks, as the Skylab-3 film did not have the same issue. 

This presented an interesting challenge for preserving these materials, as a single photograph was unable to copy all of the information contained in the emulsion. It was decided that multiple photographs would be taken of each individual frame, all with slightly different exposure settings. In photography this is called “bracketing” and allowed for the creation of a set of images which contained all of the information captured on the original film. This; however, presents another challenge, how then can this data be recombined into a single image? HDR processing allowed for us to take multiple files, then “tone map" them into a single image. Photoshop was used for processing of select images, the results of which are shown in Fig. 3. We found that the HDR process was able to render all detail that was visible to the naked eye with a light table, along with pulling out certain details that were invisible beforehand. "

The alpha version of the SD&PP website is now live at www.preserve-space.org

70mm scans have been completed along with the 3, 35mm reels. ILX-LR1 has proved to be a nominal system

Inital testing of the ILX-LR1 camera recieved december of 2024 have been progressing nicely. With adequate capture of detail across entire film luminance range.