Digitizing old 35MM slides

[BarryinMN]

Anyone have tips or sources for converting 35MM slides?

I have about 400 from the late '50's & early 60's. There is a grand total of 2 tractor related. Allis Chalmers Model C or CA.

Anyone know the history of slides? Invention date, peak popularity of these things, etc?

 

[Muhammad]

Some flatbed scanners have attachments to scan slides. Resolution won't be the best, but it will give you enough quality to reprint them at 4x6.

If you wanted to scan all of them at high resolution to reprint at larger sizes (say, 8x10 or 11x14) your best bet would be a dedicated film scanner. You can get good ones on eBay for ~$300 (Nikon Coolscan IV, for example).

 

[RobertN]

I have a little bit older HP Scanjet 5370 flatbed scanner. It has an adapter that allows scanning of slides and other transparencies. It works very well, and can make a very nice 8x10. 11x17 is pushing it a bit. I think it will run like 1200dpi, which is decent.

You can get dedicated scanners. They will scan at 2400dpi and higher.

I would take them to a good photography shop or print shop. Most can scan slides for a fee, and put them on a CD for you.

I do not know the dates on slides, but they have been around for decades.

The advantage to slides is they are typically very high resolution small grained film. They typically are great for enlargement; we have a number of enlargements from our trips to Alaska and Canada.

Slides are also inexpensive to develop and mount. Once mounted, they are easy to view while deciding which ones you want to enlarge. Remember, Pro's will shoot dozens of photo's of a subject from different angles, different lighting, different apereture/shutter settings ect. It is less expensive to shoot a bunch, develop, and view, to decide on that one perfect shot that goes in the magazine.

Slides do have a downfall, in that they require exact exposure settings for shutter and apeture. If you are barely off, the slide will either be dark or washed out. It is common to bracket slides, taking a picture at correct exposure, and one a little over and another a little under exposed, looking for that perfect medium.

A lot of that has been superceded with digital though. you can do all that very quickly with digital.

For high resolution shots or major enlargement though, slide film still has its uses. An ASA 64 or slower slide film has tiny grain. To match the resolution, you would need like a 24mega-pixel digital camera.

 

[Bird]

I had a thousand slides, made with a cheap camera in the '60s and '70s; 100 per carousel type tray and 10 trays. But the trays and projector were Keystone brand, the projector died and I couldn't find parts and the trays wouldn't fit other projectors. So last Fall, my youngest daughter and grandson knew I was shopping and looking at scanners, pricing the cost of having someone else convert them to CDs, etc., but I never decided what to do, since it looked like the cost would be $250 and up, plus a lot of time that I didn't have right then. Sometimes procrastination pays off. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif My Christmas present from the daughter was the slides on both CD and DVD, and the DVD also has a couple of reels of the old Super 8mm home movies that I also had. I don't know what it cost, but she had a local company do it.

 

[reb]

I bought a Canon D1250U2F scanner a couple of years ago. It has an adapter for slides and will scan at 2400 dpi. I have printed several 8 1/2 x 11 pictures that I find quite satisfactory (maybe not professional quality, but equal to my skills as a photographer). The problem I have noticed is that often the pictures need a lot of cleanup from dust on the slides. Adobe Photoshop Elements does a pretty good job.

 

[Av8r3400]

Check with your local film developer/camera shop. They often offer this service of putting old negetives or slides to CD/DVD format. As bird said they can do super 8 too.

 

[RobertN]

Remember when you use slides, you can dust them with those small can of compressed air/gas.

Also, when you scan or enlarge, there is a margin of the slide that you lose if you leave them in the holder. You are only getting about 85-90% of the frame... They can be dismounted. Some photoshops sell new frames to remount the slides.

We have shot TONS of slides, and had a number of them enlarged. When we get the slide back, it is always in new frame/mount.

 

[reb]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( you can dust them with those small can of compressed air/gas. )</font>

I'll have to try that--I've been using a camel-hair brush on a plastic bulb to blow off the dust.

As for not getting the full frame--I haven't found that to be a big problem. I frequently want to crop the picture a bit anyway.

 

[_RaT_]

I have hundreds of slides to go through and sort (toss the junk) and digitize the rest. Back in the 70's and 80's all I did was slides. Unfortunately, with slides, the color on my predominantly Kodachrome transparency film is getting pretty bad, I can imagine the folks with slides from the 60's have some pretty muted color. My 90's Fuji Velvia transparencies are still decent so the sooner you get the film converted to digital, the better off you are. I have access to a Coolscan 8000 which is slow. It's going to take awhile.

 

[jinman]

I have an HP dedicated slide and film scanner, but it is painfully slow. If you can get a carousel slide projector and screen set up, you can just project the images and shoot them with a digital camera mounted on a tripod. It won't be as high a resolution as a scanner, but most likely you will be looking at them on a 72 dpi monitor screen and it really won't matter. Don't even worry about whether the slides are upside down or backwards when you load them in the trays. After you get them all in digital form, it's a simple process to rotate and mirror the images. This is about the quickest way I know of doing the conversion.

The hard thing these days is finding a slide projector. /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif

 

[RobertN]

I have two slide projectors /forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif

Oh, and a screen /forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif /forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif

Until I get a digital SLR, my trusty Nikon F100 continues to get a workout /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

[RobertN]

Interesting...

When I opened this thread to read the latest posts this evening, the little adds that come up just above the posts were for scanning slides and pictures!

I went to one link:
scanning add seen on TBN

 

[_RaT_]

I found that once I went digital, I have begun experimenting much more then I would ever thought of before. Using flash is a so much better since you can take corrective measures immediately. I never used flash much before but with digital it opens up a whole new meaning. The interesting thing too is I'm getting better 8X10's done on my Epson R800 then I did at semi custom labs doing my slides and the benefit of photo cropping. I am anxious to get some of my better transparencies digitized so I can do the same. My various 35mm cameras get used a tiny bit, I sold my better one with a super lens but digital also has the stinkin crop factor on the prosumer SLR's so I needed more wide angle then a 135mm portrait lens offered. I have not given up on film completely but it would not be hard. I love the versatility of digital and "cheap" picture it affords, I much prefer the 1:1 ratio of the 35mm film and lens as well as the much narrower depth of field it offers. .

 

[Henry]

I just finished a project restoring about 900 slides taken between 1946 and 1971. Due to their age, many of the original 35mm slides were badly faded and scratched. The following hardware & software was used in the restoration process:
<ul type="square">
[*]A Slide Scanner. It’s a special hardware device that is especially made for digitally scanning the slides into the computer. I purchased a PrimeFilm 1800u slide scanner (digitizes the original slides at 1800 dpi).

[*]Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 using these filters:
- Kodak Digital ROC version 1.1.3 (acquired separately as a plug-in) – This is the real magic necessary to restore faded slides !!!!
- Dust & Scratch (built-in filter)
- Quick-fix filters (built-in filter)

[*]Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0
[/list]

The following steps were used to scan and restore the slides:
<ul type="square">
[*]Each slide was individually scanned, which created the original “jpeg” image. The jpeg images were stored in directories that loosely describe when or where the slides were photographed. The files names also indicate the order in which with slides were scanned. It takes about 1 minute to scan each slide to produce apprx. a 5 meg jpeg (big).

[*]Using Photoshop Elements, a combination of filters was used to restore the jpeg images. In the majority of cases, Digital ROC provided the real magic by eliminating the red fading on most of the slides, followed by the quick-fix filters for brightness adjustment. The dust and scratch filter was used sparingly to cleanup really dirty or scratched slides.

[*]Using Photoshop Album, each slide was dated and any hand-writing on the slides was transcribed into the title field for each slide. In addition the slides were organized into meaningful categories. As information, Photoshop Album’s title and date information gets embedded inside the jpeg image as meta-data. Only jpeg specific programs know how to access this information.

[*]For presentation purposes, some of the better slides were titled by embedding a large-font title directly into the jpeg file (as a single layer). The titled jpegs were saved separately with an “_edited” suffix. The original (restored) jpeg files were also preserved as the embedded titles cannot be removed.

[*]Multi-page PDF’s were created to support easy presentation and viewing.
[/list]

I'm very very happy with the results. It was a fairly significant effort, but well worth it to preserve family history. The total investment in hardware & software was approx. $400. Given the poor condition of my slides, I'm not convinced that a slide restoration service could have done a very good job.

See the attached slide as an example. It's a bit grainy because I had to scale back the original 5 meg jpeg back to a 100k version to post on TBN. Not bad for a 50 year old slide!

 

[mikim]

good grief! how many hours??? that must've taken forever to do all that .... great results though. -- kudos

 

[_RaT_]

Thanks Henry, very helpful post. Did you know Photoshop Elements 3 now has Album built in?

 

[RobertN]

Curiously, how were the slides stored and archived?

It was my understanding that Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides held up very well, unless exposed to dust, sun, ect.

We have a friend that teaches photography(I took outdoor photo), leads tours(wife and I did her Alaska tour), as well as being a pro photographer. She has slides going back to the 60's in her archives of commercially available photostock. they are stored in a cool dry place, in archival quality sleeves and or boxes.

 

[Henry]

The slides were stored for years in a relatively air-tight metal box. It never made any sense to me which types of slides (Kodachrome, etc.) held up better than others. There were some slides that were completely black or so red-tinted that I could not bring them back. I think I was lucky with the dust & scratches due to the way they were stored. However, it's pretty amazing what you can do to remove dust and scratches from the slides!

The total project took me about 4 months of nights and weekends..... it was a bit mind-numbing due the repetitive process, but the results were fabulous!