Salvaging old film photos

Back in 2010, I stumbled upon some 110 film for sale inside a Mesquite Walgreens while visiting my parents. I was surprised to see it there and even more surprised to see that it was unexpired. I hadn't seen the format anywhere in years, and hadn't shot a cartridge of it since 1995. I ended up buying several boxes of the stuff and actually shooting four cartridges of it not long afterward at the Mochalux open mic, Curtain Club, and just around my apartment. It then sat dormant on a shelf for thirteen years before I finally got around to getting it developed. I hadn't planned on this - on more than one occasion over the past several years I had looked online for a lab that could still develop and possibly print the film, but I just never viewed it as a priority. I never bothered to freeze the film cartridges, so when I finally took some of them to Garland Camera to be processed and scanned, I wasn't expecting pristine color fidelity or high quality results. And by then, save for some of the shots from Mochalux, I had long since forgotten what had been recorded.

In October of last year, I finally saw the results from the two cartridges I decided to have processed, and they were... bad. Really, really bad, as in nearly-everything-being-unusable bad. Aside from the expected issues with color accuracy, an expected consequence of not being able to scan 110 format film myself, there were serious impacts from apparent light leakage, horizontal scratching, and overall underexposure with almost all the pictures. The underexposure was due to my not bothering to take along the flash attachment at the time of shooting, but I'm not sure if the scratching came from mishandling at the lab, problems with the film cartridges, or an issue with the camera used. As for the light leakage, I don't know if this came from the camera, if there was some leakage into the unprocessed cartridges during their long residence on my bookshelf, or if something happened during developing. Fortunately, photo editing software can sometimes help salvage this kind of material.

The original, raw scan - discolored, desaturated, and afflicted with the effects of light leakage:

The image following a judicious application of level adjustments, saturation, burning, grayscaling, and a vignette filter:

Not bad, if I do say so myself.