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!
