Transferring slides to digital

Factual Questions
1

Hey Dopers, wondering if you could help with a problem. My parents have hundreds (and HUNDREDS) of slides that they took during their travels in their youth. These slides are about thirty-odd years old, and I know they’ll eventually degrade, possibly pretty soon.

These are pictures of some pretty interesting places - Afghanistan and Kabul in the seventies, the Soviet Union, Indonesia, etc. I’d hate to lose them.

Is there a way we can transfer them to digital photos? I realise a regular scanner wouldn’t work…is there some specialised equipment we can use, or a photo lab we can go to or send the slides to?

2

It’s expensive (sending for a professional). I have some slides from the 50’s that my auntie took around the world that have weathered quite well. Some even suggest just displaying them conventionally and digitally photographing them off the screen.

3

You can get a scanner with a film scanner attachment. I would suggest using one of Photoshop’s automation features to speed up your workflow too.

4

I have seen some scanners with a slide attachment. It is a fitting that you can put the slide into and is backlit. I was told that it could also be used for negatives and the software would reverse the colors. However, it has been a while since I’ve seen one and I have never used it. There are professional services that can do this, as well as Super 8 to VHS or DVD, but I would imagine it is pricy as Common Tater mentions. If you have enough slides, it may be worth the money to get a special scanner or attachment.

The other week at a family gathering we pulled out the old slide projector and slides and had a great time seeing images from long ago. It got me to thinking about doing this as well, but I have not pursued it yet.

5

I’ve got a scanner that will do both slides and negatives. It wasn’t expensive either - not much more than a regular scanner at the time - and does a good job. It’s a few years old, an Epson Perfection 1240U.

In essence, it’s a normal flatbed A4 scanner, with a unit that fits on top of the bed and plugs into the back of the scanner (with the normal lid removed): this provides backlight, and came with a selection of plastic guides that hold negative strips or slides of various sizes in position. Then the lid of the transparency unit is closed, and the scanner does its stuff. Worth noting that when the add-on unit is connected, the scanner automatically changes its focal length to compensate for the additional distance.

I’ve only used the transparency attachment for scanning 35mm colour negatives (using PaintShop Pro 7 and TWAIN, plus the scanner’s drivers), but that certainly yielded excellent results. I transferred about 250 shots this way, one at a time - it was a tedious job, but well worth the effort and the cost of the scanner. I’m fairly sure that slides can be scanned without being removed from their frames.

Just briefly checking now, that model seems to have been superseded by the Epson Perfection V100, costing about $100.

6

I’ve done my own slide scanning, on both a flatbed scanner (Epson Perfection 1200U) with a special slide holder and on a dedicated slide scanner (an Acer machine, I forget what model). “Tedious” is a very good word for it, and quite honestly I always got crappy results using the flatbed scanner approach. I spent way too much time trying to clean up the files in Photoshop afterward.

I will never do it myself again, having found a professional service that I like very much. This service did a fantastic job for me with some irreplaceable slides I took for my dissertation, at what I think is a pretty reasonable cost, and quickly too. I decided to go with them after reading the recommendations from various other scientists, and I was not disappointed. I’ll be sending them my film negatives next, once I get the blasted things in order.

7

If you have a digital SLR, you might also consider a slide duplicator. This attaches to the front of your camera lens to provide a 1:1 reproduction. (or you can zoom and crop, depending on the model.)

Flatbed scanners with negative/slide can be real hit or miss, IMHO. I have a Canon 8000F which sometimes produces amazing results, and often produces crap. The Epsons (from what I’ve seen) are somewhat better, but nothing really beats a dedicated film scanner.

8

If you really care about preserving these slides, I’d avoid the flatbed scanner with slide attachment and just go straight to the dedicated slide/negative scanner. My experiences have been far more miss then hit with the flatbed adapters.

It will be tedious, and a professional service may indeed be what you want for 100’s and 100’s of slides.

9

Two things: first, I agree with blue sky dreamer that scanning, editing, and cleaning up a lot of slides (or negs) yourself is a very time consuming and tedious process, especially with a flatbed-style scanner. If you want to do it yourself, I strongly recommend buying a special-purpose slide scanner, like these, ranging in price between about $200 and $2,000. Yes, they’re pricey, but sending them to a pro will be costly, too.

However, unless you have the skills and aptitude for doing this technical work, lots of free time, and lots and lots of patience, I’d also strongly recommend sending them to a service like the one bsd has linked to. When you add up the cost of the hardware and software you’ll need, plus a reasonable hourly rate for your own time, you’ll probably find that even at 59 cents per slide, the service is a better deal.

Second, no matter what you do, DO NOT discard the slides on the assumption that now you have the images in a permanent (digital) form. In fact, properly stored, the slides may have a longer archival life than any digital storage medium you can use. People seem to think that digital media are more permanent than paper or film, but this is not absolutely true.

The main problem with digital media is the rapid pace of changing technical standards. Ten years ago almost every computer had a 5.25-inch floppy drive. These days many new machines don’t even have a 3.5-inch drive. And the vast array of memory cards and sticks that have proliferated with digital cameras are almost sure to be unreadable in another ten or twenty years. And with no reader, your grandchildren will have no way of knowing what priceless memories are trapped on a 30-year-old memory stick they find in your desk drawer while they’re looking for your will. (Hell, they may not even know what the thing is.) Likewise, don’t assume that a CD or DVD will be playable 20+ years from now.

Whereas you can just glance at your parents’ slides with your own eye and tell that there’s something interesting there.

Unfortunately, the best archival method of preserving color transparencies or negs is to have color separations made on B&W film, a process that is more expensive than most people are willing to bear for ordinary snapshots. But proper storage, at the proper temp and humidity, and in good, acid-free archive-quality sleeves and boxes, will ensure that they last as long as possible. IIRC, Kodachrome is the most durable of transparency emulsions, with Ektachrome somewhat less stable. I haven’t looked, but I’m sure that there are numerous resources on the Web on archival storage of film.

Good luck.

10

I’ve done some flatbed scanning of slides for the purposes of constructing course websites. The scanned slides came out perfectly fine for web reproduction, and they printed out pretty well too, but i’m not sure you’d want to go this route for high-quality archival images.

My university has an excellent digital lab with high-quality Nikon slide scanners, and this is really the way to go, if you can get access to that sort of equipment. Not only is the scanning quality excellent, but these high-end scanners also come with software (on Nikons, i think it’s called ICE) that will really clean the image up for you. When you’re scanning slides, you use high resolutions, and every speck of dust shows up, but the ICE software on the Nikon got rid of basically all of it.

Anyway, it might be worth seeing if you can book some time in a lab like this. You might have to pay, but i think it might be worth it. Or, as others have suggested, if you’re not short of money you could pay a pro lab to do it for you.

Here is a small gallery of my pictures, created from slides using the Nikon LS2000 slide scanner. Those pictures are quite small (reduced for the web), but the higher resolution versions also look great.

11

I recently coverted 400+ slides using such a duplicator with my super zoom digital camera…any camera should work as long as the lens adapter can be threaded for the duplicator and you have decent optical zoom. Auto white balance would also help if you can’t generate enough white light behind the duplicator (but a florescent bulb should work fine…I used a light box.

The results were more than adequate, but not quite professional grade. About the only thing I did was to blow off each slide with some compressed air to remove most of the dust and batch edit them using IRFAN (freeware) to resaturate the colors (which on many sets had faded) and crop them evenly. The whole process took approximately 10 hours…once you get the camera set up on a tripod pointed at a bright light source, its just a matter of loading the duplicator and snapping.

I only paid $60 for the duplicator…I had researched sending them out to a shop (too expensive) or scanning (too tedious)…if you just want a decent digital set without a lot of cost or hassle I’d recommend this method.

Gerome - if you are interested in more details, pls let me know.

12

Just for reference, here is a scan I did on a flatbed scanner from a 35mm colour negative source. The camera was a Pentax MEF - in other words, a reasonable budget SLR. The film was, I think, Kodachrome 100ASA, which had been stored in its sleeve for about ten years. No cleaning of the film was done. The JPEG compression ratio was chosen to make lossy compression invisible on the monitor I had at that time (a 15" CRT), although I did batch compression based on a sample of the 250-plus photos I was scanning, so it wasn’t individually optimised. Other details are as in my earlier post.

Oh, and it took quite a few hours, several days in real time - mostly loading film strips into the holder, bashing keyboard shortcuts into PSP7, waiting a minute or so for each scan, cropping the image down to the individual frame size, and naming the save file.

I mention this just to give the OP an idea of the quality available using that technique, and the work involved.

Plus, I’m actually quite proud of the photo for some reason. I took it at a market in Bhopal, India in 1995.

13

I projected mine onto white smooth poster board, seemed to work better than a regular slide screen for me. Set the camera above the projector and angled the projector up a few degrees and the camera down a few degrees where the photos came out square.

I have 52 X 140 slot carrousel’s and it took me about a week of working an hour or two each night after dark to get about ½ of them done. All I wanted to do was be able to show them on peoples computer screens. I have no interest in prints and after about one or two generation’s, 99% of the pictures will be of no interest to anyone.

I gave up long ago trying to get people to look at even 50 pictures. They just really don’t care, even if the pictures are very good.

the slides themselves are holding up really well. Most were shot with ASA 25 Kodachrome in a Minolta SR-1 (1963 model ) and most are from 1963 to 1975. They look like the will last another 50 years.

I figure the ones I put up on message boards and web pages and send to people will be floating around for as many years as a person could want and are nearly indestructible that way. If the net goes away, I’ll be long gone and won’t care anyway.

Case in point. Barrington’s picture I have seen before. I bet he has posted a link to it before, someplace, … right? And I bet some people have downloaded it and are saving it on their computers.

If yo have more $$$ than time, spend the $$$. If not, and your time is available, rig up a setting and spend a few hours a night for a week if you are dealing with thousands like I was.

If you take pictures for money or enter contests, go the expensive rout but for just having them available to send in email, cheap way works just fine.

YMMV

14

Here is one from New Orleans I took in 1966.

Pushboat