35mm slides and negatives
Hi guys, it's been quite a long time since I posted in here, I don't get much time to use the camera these days.My friends dad passed away a few months ago, he had a lot of 35mm slides and negatives.
My friend says they slides may be in the thousands, he loved motorbikes and was crazy about the Manx TT.
He wants them digitized for family and to share on enthusiast websites/forums.
He has looked around for a peice of kit to convert them and is a bit lost, some are cheap some expensive.
He will never use the kit again after he is done.
Can anyone recommend anything that would work with both slides and negatives that won't cost him an arm and a leg and get decent results? I would check the slides first to see if they are any good. I scanned 1000's of slides & negatives a few years ago even had a bit of a cottage business going. I had a top of the range Canon flatbed scanner, which came with inserts for 36mm negatives & slides & t=you could scan around 10 at a time. It had a restore setting called Cracked Ice to enhance slides it thought below par. I bought it around 2007, but 12 months later, Canon brought a new one out & stopped support for mine so the software went out of date & it wouldn't function properly. If the slides are poor quality you can't do much with them to make them better.
I've got one of these now that serves both purposes, Canon CanoScan LiDE 120 in Home Scanners at Canon
Alternatively, there are company's offering to do it for you but it ain't cheap. Last time this came up I posted this - I apologise for quoting myself but the advice still stands.
As @stearman65 suggests a good look through to see if they're any good would save you a lot of time and/or money. As someone who was in a similar position and needed to scan a few thousand 35mm slides I can tell you that the choice is not easy. The first thing you need to decide on is "how good a result do you want?"
That is not necessarily an easy question to answer as you not only have to consider how you want the photos to look but what you are going to do with them in the future.
The thing to consider with slides and negs is that over time they will have collected a lot of dust, even if they've been stored well and you need to decide what you want to do about it. If you don't mind the odd hair, speckles of dust or even areas of mold then you don't need to worry about either having them ultrasonically cleaned or to have them scanned using ICE. If you do want all or at least most of the dirt removed then the cheapest option is to use a scanner with ICE but this is also the slowest option as you either have to trust that what it thinks is a hair isn't actually a thin line of something that needs to remain or check each slide individually.
In terms of the scanner itself, by far the cheapest option is to use a flatbed scanner and the results are pretty good but they don't compare to a dedicated film scanner as the sensor is just too far away on a flatbed and so you loose detail. If you not need the absolute maximum image quality than a flatbed is fine.
Then you need to consider the scanning resolution. A dedicated film scanner will scan at much higher resolutions than a flatbed. On my 35mm scanner I typically scan at a minimum of 3600dpi and usually 7200dpi whilst there are flatbed scanners that say they can scan at that and even higher, they don't actually achieve that level of resolution. The main problem with such high resolutions is the amount of time it takes to scan. It may only be a few minutes but times that by a few thousand and you are talking months or years to complete.
When I was scanning my slides I decided I only wanted to do this once and so bought a dedicated film scanner, scanned at the highest resolution and restored the colours and used ICE that I adjusted individually and then finished off each photo in Photoshop removing things that ICE missed. It took forever and I've not really finished but am taking a break that has now been over a year. In total I think I've done around 2000 slides. Yes a film scanner cost me nearly £300 but that's a fraction of what it would have cost to get them scanned by a company and the result I got was far higher but probably overkill, I just didn't want to ever have to do or pay for it again. Agree with Peakoverload.
A few years back I took on a similar project in scanning the family archives of negatives, slides and composites.I used an Epson V500 with ICE technology.The results from the negatives and slides were stunning.MUCH better than scanning from the composite photos.Also found a few gems that we hadn't seen before as the negs and transps were well stored and dated back to the 50s and60s.Unlike a lot of the photos that had long been lost or ripped.So be prepared to find some 'unseen pics'!.
I thought that as this was a 'one off' project (not quite turned out like that!) and important project that it was worth doing right so I did a lot of research before I did any actual scanning.
I even looked up on 'how to clean negatives'.
Other things to consider....
You may require a lot of disk space as ideally you should scan to tiff, 24bitand 4Kresolution.
DON'T scan to lossy 8bit jpeg if you can help it.
Brush up on your Photoshop skills for basic restoration and understand the different types of sharpening etc.The scanner and ICE tech does a great job but you may want to bypass and create a more 'raw' file and do your post in PS.
Come up with a good naming convention and categorise your files.
Scan B&W images to the same format as colour ones (i.e. do not use the 'Greyscale' option) as you will have a lot more image data to play with. I made this mistake early on.
At the time some 6 years ago 4K was round the corner so I consciously scanned to this res or higher (you could argue that '8k is just around the corner' but I don't think it is so it's your call.You have to weigh up file size and PC power when editing).I mainly view them now on a 4K TV but it's still a good size to do fairly large prints if need be.
You will need plenty of spare time as it can be a quite slow and sometimes laborious process.
Seek out photos from family/friends' lofts.I found a treasure trove of slides in my brother's loft.All pics that none of us had ever seen before!
You never know where the photos may end up.. Last xmas I did a photo book for my mum using a lot of the pics I had scanned some six years previously, basically telling her life story.She was absolutely thrilled to bits!
Initially I didn't show the results to anyone and had a big slideshow on the 55"TV at xmas to the family which went down really well.
Six years later negatives and photos are still emerging, so the project never quite finishes but does slow down considerably! So I'm not sure with your "He will never use the kit again after he is done" statement.You just never know.As once word gets out you may get requests from elsewhere!
Good luck and feel free to ask any Qs. Hi,
Don't you have a moderately decent camera you can use?
I never understand why owners of DSLRs don't use extension tubes and photograph the slides/negs{ using a stand/frame to maintain alignment.} ... you can use artificial light that's constant, or (better for colour) use daylight having done a white balance for the session.
An alternative way is to buy a strong "close-up lens" - but that may introduce distortion.
You can make a suitable framing set-up using wood, (the more rigid the better), spendingtime at this stage will be worthwhile if you have 1000's to view/copy.
Whilst dust, gremlins etc. are an issue, I presume OP had given these old pics a brief look and thought they were worth copying. Sometimes their value is hidden, or of family interest.
Be careful to keep them in the same boxes, perhaps giving them a number code which can be changed when the order is established.
Scanners are now included in many Printers, but I've never been a fan, as the only one I had was tediously slow. By comparison, using a camera is quick and you can check the results.
If a picture has obvious flaws then mild "correction" at the taking-stage will help with later software-fixes.
You may need to buy a dedicated HDD, for saving these files. Check after the first 100 whether you needseparate folders: Mororbikes, Family, Other, Etc. as the files will be sequentially numbered from where the camera filing starts.
Another use, if they are saved as jpeg (for example) is in a screen-presentation which you can Title, add voiceover and (not too much ) mood music. IMHO Presentations should be about 15 minutes long, with pictures around 12 seconds, unless there are several which are similar when 5 seconds should do. Typically 5x15 = 75 pictures. ( about two 35mm films worth ).
If you use a video-editor, you can animate the pictures by zooming-in, which concentrates the viewer's attention.
I've seen "Slide Digitisers" which read like they are the very best...but in the small print you'll realise they are 5Mpx which isn't too good a starting point.... although very convenient.
There are professional labs that will put the images on DVD ( as files), but they will be expensive -and sometimes you don't want to risk sending them through the post. Beware that local-shops may accept your pictures.... but they will probably send them away ( so you could do this yourself).
Have you joined a local Camera-Club?There will be folks there with suitable kit, who will show you how.
A local Motor-bike club is another possibility, as folks usually have more than one interest..
Good Luck.
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