Advice On Converting Slides To Digital

[smoke665]

I have several thousand slides some in carousels some in boxes that I need to sort through. Most of these were shot by my father who passed away 30 years ago. Since they haven't been stored under the best of conditions I'm assuming that a lot of them are probably to far gone to save. Of the ones that might still be salvageable what advice might others have for converting to digital. Should I buy a scanner and suggestions on which one? Or should I just use a commercial service and suggestions?

 

[Ysarex]

Sorry this went unanswered. I think maybe the word thousands caused a general panic and a kind of run from the room reaction. D*mn this is a tough one.

I sympathize as I'm now and have previously struggled with this one. I'm calling this my summer of scanning as I'm not teaching for these three months. I'm trying to get negs scanned every day but in the end it will be at best a small dent.

There are so many qualifications to your question:
How much time.
How much work.
How much quality.
How much skill.
How much money.
How much compromise.

Thinking about myself regarding those questions, where am I compromising and will I be happy with the results? Because of my relationship to multiple college campuses I have a wealth of scanning hardware available. I can drive over to one or the other labs and use everything from one of the Epson V series scanners to a Hasselblad scanner to a new Braun FS120 just purchased last semester. The campuses where I work are still pretty much committed to film and so I get the hardware access. But the drive is a PITA. I have an Epson V600 at home on my desk and I'm taking that easy route. It's not as good as the Hasselbald scanner or that new Braun. But is it good enough and will I be happy when I've logged all the hours or will I be kicking myself and then doing the work over? As it is I'm going to die before I get this job done -- yeah, thousands.

Anyway, that's one option for you. Find a college campus (maybe Community College) where they have the hardware and the cost to audit a class gets you access. It could be a good way to go. One of the campuses where I teach (Community College) has a tuition deal for seniors. It's very common for them to audit a class to basically get darkroom access.

You have a Pentax DSLR. Is it equipped with Pentax pixel shift tech? This may be your best option. It will take some effort to set up a copy stage with light source and you may need a lens for the camera, but re-photographing the slides with a digital camera will eventually beat scanning hands down in terms of time. For a lens I would consider an adapter and used enlarger lens as a high quality low cost option.

Sending them out: You know, you get what you pay for. So much of the commercial low cost scanning is such rubbish. Yes there are some competent technicians out there, but not for half a buck per scan. You pay for people and this is a job where you need a technician and not just an automated machine.

Scanning them yourself: Ouch! It takes forever. You need the hardware. The age of scanning is in decline. There are less and less scanners (and good scanners) available every year. It's a simple supply and demand situation and so a good 35mm film scanner is going to cost you. You can shop used and that's probably the best way to go but then you're up against hardware compatibility issues. For example I have a Nikon Coolscan on a desk in an office on one campus. It used to be in the lab at the teachers work station but fell into disuse when driver software was no longer available that would run it with the new computers. Nikon long since stopped supporting it. I still use it but I'm the only one left on the campus that can. I went through the trouble of getting 3rd party driver software installed on my laptop and setting it up -- not always the easiest thing to do. There can be interface issues with used scanners. At the same campus we also have a Nikon Coolscan 9000 sitting unused in a drawer; the interface is Firewire.

You can get an inexpensive scanner that will do a fair job with 35mm slides. Be sure you're happy with the results. These are typically multi-format scanners in a flat-bed configuration. I'm using my Epson V600 to scan 120 film right now. If I were scanning 35mm I'd be on campus and using that Nikon scanner. I can get a pretty decent 35mm scan from the Epson and maybe good enough for what you want, but I can see the difference when I scan with better hardware. As I said will I be kicking myself later that I'm using the Epson right now.

Hope some of that helps.

Joe

 

[Designer]

Or should I just use a commercial service and suggestions?

There is a range of cost/results that you should consider. You can probably find reviews online. I once answered a solicitation for low-cost scanning, and here's the story:

They said they would clean the slides before scanning. They did not.

I sorted through my slides and selected 750 for scanning. This is something I needed to do anyway.

I sent that bunch off according to the instructions, making sure they were all oriented correctly and banded into groups of 50. I asked for the slides to be returned, and I'm glad I did, because the whole project needs to be done again.

They sent a DVD with the scans, and every piece of dust shows up. I sent them a note expressing my dismay, and was informed that they don't clean them before scanning. So my money was wasted, but at least I can still get them scanned after I clean them.

 

[smoke665]

Joe, the hardest part will probably be the pre-inspection part. Many of these dates back to my Father's shots so I'm sure that many are so far gone that unfortunately they will get pitched. That's a good idea on using the camera though that might depend on the final quantity. I'm still finishing up boxes of old prints some dating back into the early 1900'S. Surprisingly some of those are still decent

 

[The_Traveler]

but re-photographing the slides with a digital camera will eventually beat scanning hands down in terms of time.

and in quality over cheap scans

So much of the commercial low cost scanning is such rubbish.

total rubbish

 

[smoke665]

Any feedback on that range of costs for larger quantities?

 

[bratkinson]

A bit over a year ago, I decided it was time to start scanning several thousand of my own slides of my first big hobby...trains. I read a number of reviews and considering my price range for a slide/film capable scanner, I settled on an Epson V550. It does 4 slides at a time and the software that came with it is reasonably easy to learn and use. As all my slides were 35mm film, I didn't have any problems.

Then a friend approached me about scanning her family photos, shot by her deceased father in the 1950s and 1960s when she was a girl. I figured "maybe a couple hundred shots". It was just over 1700! As her mother was in the final stages of Alzheimers, I figured she'd like to show some of the photos to her mom, so I started scanning about 100-150/day and editing those. I held my 'time' to about 5-6 hours per day. It helps to be retired.

Regardless of how good/bad/<whatever> the slides had been stored, there WILL BE problems. The two big ones are color shift (and fading), and dust. Even on my own slides which have been stored in reasonably good clean/dry/60-70 degree environment in Carousel trays, I still had lots of dust. I resorted to using my air compressor with a 'blow' attachment while the slides were still in the Carousels to get the 'big' dust. That helped, but I still had to individually use a lens brush to gently brush off each slide before putting it in my scanner. My friends family slides were beyond dusty! One would think that a jet of compressed air from a 110PSI compressor would blow off dust 100 feet away, but it didn't.

The Epson software has a number of options, as does separately purchased software to automatically do dust removal and color correction. Sometimes it works great, sometimes, not so great. The big thing with automatic dust removal is the 'radius' (in pixels) it needs to consider. The larger the radius, the more 'softening' of focus in the result. For that reason, I set the dust&scratches option to 1 pixel. The rest I cleaned up mostly in Lightroom using the 'heal function'. I also set the white balance and did color correction in Lightroom. However, for larger dust or scratches, the heal function would get confused, so I left the 'big ones' to fix in Photoshop Elements using the clone feature...It's much more accurate. A fair number of my friends' slides had mold on them as well. Some were so bad that I did what I could with peoples' faces and just let the rest of the mold stay in the image.

Perhaps the biggest surprise I had from all this is the per-slide processing time. If it were as simple as brush them off, scan them, and save them, that alone would total a minute or so per picture (the scanner does 4 at a time). I generally limited myself to 2 minutes or so per slide of Lightroom processing. However, what I perceived as 'very important' family pictures (her parents wedding shots, especially, as well as wedding shots of all their children), I spent 5-10 minutes EACH processing those to get the best I could.

I also discovered that sufficient computer 'horsepower' is a necessity. I started out using my 4.1ghz quad-processor computer and that produced 1-2 second response time for each click of the mouse in Lightroom & Photoshop Elements. Having lots of RAM (I have 16gb) also speeds things up considerably.

In the end, I tried a number of editing 'tricks' I never attempted previously. At the same time, I did a lot of production-line tricks such as when seeing a group of shots all from the same position and lighting, I'd do my 'blanket' edits on the first one, then highlight the rest of that group and SYNC them in Lightroom. That saved a lot of time. But the trick there is don't SYNC photos you've used the heal function on, as that action gets synchronized too!...so does cropping (mostly for straightening purposes). Heal, crop, and other non-general edits must be done individually. One thing for sure, you will become suprisingly more proficient in whatever editing programs you use!

I still haven't found the time to get back to my own scanning though. Being retired gives me LESS free time that I had while working!

 

[Designer]

but re-photographing the slides with a digital camera will eventually beat scanning hands down in terms of time.

and in quality over cheap scans

If I were to do this method of copying, do I need any special setup, such as a macro lens, for instance? Can I find instructions in an online video?

 

[fmw]

I view my transparencies with a Kodak Carousel projector and a screen. Really old fashioned. But the best approach may be to acquire a projector and screen.

 

[480sparky]

I finally drug out three generations of slides and set them next to my computer. It took me about 6 months* of scanning with a Plustek 8200i to get them all scanned and cataloged. This includes a prescan and minor edits (exposure, composition, color correction). All were scanned at 800 pixels. Keepers were then rescanned at full resolution (about 35 mp each).

*The 6 months was maybe 3 or 4 hours on the weekends, and an hour every evening... on average.