When I first came to the Northeast in the mid seventies a good friend and I spent quite a bit of time driving through New England in his heaterless Ford Torino. Several of these trips coincided with "peak color" in some areas and the effect was dramatic enough that the memories are still vivid. I was armed with a camera and many rolls of film (it is surprising how well a graduate student could live) and captured a large number of fine images. Sadly most of the images have seriously faded with very unequal color shifts. That brings us to the magic of Photoshop.
Photoshop is an amazing program that is as important to me as any of my camera lenses and is worth the huge amount of money I have sent Adobe over the years as I have dutifully upgraded from version 2.0. The current version, 7.0, continues to be amazing and I recommend it without hesitation to anyone who is serious about digital photography.
Adobe offers a trial version for OS X users - you get 30 days use. I'm not sure what they induce, but the download is "only" on the order of 350MB (I started it to check the size, but did not continue) where the real program comes on a few CDs.
http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/photoshop/mac/7.x/Install_Adobe_Photoshop.hqx
Back to the Fall colors ...
I was able to build filters that work for my faded slides and prints. The settings are very different across film types and speeds, but once you know what film was used it is fairly easy to restore reasonable color. At some point it is too difficult to create a restoration, but thirty years with Fuji and Kodak prints and slides that have been stored in good conditions are very good candidates.
5:15:04 AM 
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