wanting to transfer old slides..

j.e.j.

Hallo

I’m wanting to transfer a load of 35mm slides which have been sitting up in the loft for years onto cd or onto the computer. Someone’s kindly lent us an Epson scanner for the purpose, which’ll save us from having to pay to get them done, but now we’re just trying to figure out how to use it :think:

Has anyone got any experience of scanning slides? I’m finding that the although the slides are square the image is coming out oblong with black panels either side. When I try to customise it it just lops off bits off the photograph. I’m having trouble getting the colour to match the originals, too. The slides are pretty old, so I don’t expect them to come out brilliantly, but would like to get them as good as I can.

fwor

My dad only recently finished processing the hundreds of slides he had.

He never found an alternative to scanning and then using Photoshop to tweak the hue and saturation settings, because he had a mix of different media (the kodak material tended to be very orange, while the Fuji had a blue emphasis).

If you are lucky and have consistent material, you may find a formula that can be applied to all, but it's more likely that every one will need specific settings. IIRC he reckoned he was doing well to get through ten an hour...

Little_Miss_Uni-Debt

Personally, I'd do it along these lines. http://www.ehow.com/how_4475176_convert-35mm-slides-cd.html

But instead of doing one slide at a time. Why not do as many as will fit on the flatbed scanner at once (with some border between them all)You will get about 8-10 pictures per scan then. Scan them all in, then slowly start the cropping/colour changing process. It's still a tedious process tweaking the colours but least it reduces the scanning time by a lot.

The above link suggests cutting a slide-shaped-hole in the centre of a piece of card I presume to remove the shadow/black panels at the sides of the slide.

It also suggests using a torch to illuminate the slide from behind, this might make the colours better.

How many have you got to do?

Hope this helps.

j.e.j.

Hi, thanks for the replies

Yes, it's a slow old process, - seems to take about 5 minutes just to scan or preview one image. The scanner will take 8 slides at a time.

I've got Adobe Photoshop so I'll have a go at tweaking the images in there. I've got about 1000 slides to transfer.. Looks like i've got myself a bit of a long-term project here:eek::rotfl:

totalsolutions

Nikon Coolscan scanners are where you need to look. Very good, high quality output, scanning the neg completely as required. Stop using the flatbed unit as you may find you are wasting your time and effort and more time in Photoshop and all for a very low image quality when the negs are in high detail colour. Now the bad news it's expensive the buy. Try for a second hand unit.

j.e.j.

totalsolutions
the negatives haven't been kept, unfortunately. I've just got the slides

totalsolutions

Same thing! Scan them, come out far better then you would expect with a coolscan. Positive or negative it's all the same just inverted.

sickparrot

j.e.j. wrote: »

totalsolutions
the negatives haven't been kept, unfortunately. I've just got the slides

Slides never had negatives, the film in the slide is the film that was in the camera.

Slides are notoriously tricky to scan, they have a very low dynamic range compared to negatives, and they almost always end up coming out looking a bit flat and grey. I have a relatively cheap Plustek film scanner and it's great with B+W and colour negatives but struggles with slides, I have to muck about with the settings on every single one which is a time consuming process, and even then there is no consistency when looking at all the scans as a whole. It takes me about 4 hours to process 50 slides.

It's a tad annoying when you hold a slide up to the window and it's all bright and colourful, then when you scan it it looks like it's been taken on a dull day. Maybe I need to spend £1000 on a scanner.