I have thousands of color slides from the 1940s to the 1970s and am embarking on a project to scan them.
I have a negative scanner (Plustek OpticFilm 7200DPI Film Scanner) and I know the basics of scanning in slides and negatives and sprucing up the images in Photoshop.
A lot of them are dirty and need cleaning. I got PEC Photographic Emulsion Cleaner and PEC-PAD Lint Free Wipes and have used them a few times but I am still looking for advice on cleaning the slides. They are priceless family heirlooms so I am scared of damaging them; it just feels weird and scary putting this chemical liquid on my slides!
Should I take the slide film out of the slide casing (cardboard or plastic) before cleaning? What else do I need to treat these slides with the utmost archival care? What else is handy - an anti-static brush, cotton gloves? I really want a light table too but that’s not really necessary.
Also how should I store the slides? Right now they are all in projector carousels. Should I keep them in there or in smaller archival boxes? (My negatives I have been transferring to Printfile Negative Sheets.)
I also have a ton of negatives that I am scanning too, so advice is needed for cleaning and handling both slides and negatives.
Here are a couple of examples of what I am talking about. This slide (untouched) it is very dirty and looks like mildew spots rather than dust. Can the PEC solution restore a slide like this?
ALSO, what file formats should I save the scans in? I am scanning the slides at 8x magnification at 300 dpi, which results in images that are about 3,200 pixels wide and print out about 10 inches wide. I always save them as .JPGs so I can upload them to Flickr etc. but I also save them as .PNGs since it is a lossless format (apparently JPG compresses the file and you lose detail). Is this sufficient? I want to make sure that these files will stand the test of time through the years and that in 20 years I won’t have to rescan them all again because I originally did them in too low a resolution or wrong file type.
If you have the time and the patience, this is a good idea. Otherwise, you often merely end up moving the dust around on your slide. You need to be able to push it off the edge of the slide, away from the image area. Of course, if you have thousands of slides, this is going to be a big pain in the ass. But, then again, scanning that many slides is going to take a whle anyway, so you might think it worth the time.
An anti-statis brush is good. You can also use compressed air and an anti-static gun. The gun makes the compressed air more efficacious at removing the dust.
I think those sheets are fine. I’ve always stored my slides in those 20-slide plastic sheets (5x4 slides), and that tends to keep most of the dust out. Read this page for some more suggestions.
I haven’t actually scanned very many of my slides, but when i did i used a Nikon slide scanner that came with Nikon’s Digital-ICE software for removing dust specks and scratches. The scanner was a very expensive one (a couple of thousand dollars worth), and it was owned by the university.
I did my best to remove dust with an anti-static cloth, and i found that the Digital-ICE software did an amazing job of getting rid of the stuff i missed. Software like this sometimes softens the image a tiny bit, but you correct for that using the unsharp mask in Photoshop. Here’s a little gallery of images (reduced in size) that i got from scanning some of my Kodachrome and Fujichrome slides.
On file formats, i saved my slide scans as TIFFs. It is also a lossless format. I have no real experience with PNG files, at least not as photographs.
I also converted my TIFF files to Photoshop (PSD) files.
In my experience, it’s also fine to just have your files as high-quality JPEGS as long as you don’t modify the originals, but copy them and modify the copies. Every time you modify and resave a JPEG, you lose some information. So keep the originals with no alteration, and just make copies if you want to mess around with them.
JPEG is a lossy format, but that doesn’t mean it can’t provide perfectly good quality pictures if you save at the highest resolution, lowest compression settings.
Let me address one area of your question that I have experience in, the file format. Since it appears that a primary concern of yours is the highest quality of image and preservation, avoid JPG file saves like the black plague. Yes, it is possible to store JPG images with very little data loss, but that requires specific knowledge that you might not want to learn. Easier and more sure is to store as TIF, which will never have a data loss. You can store TIF with LZW compression, and it is a non-lossy compression and what is compressed can be fully restored. Nothing wrong with that.
TIF is the dominant file type for professional layout work at present and probably will be readable for quite a while. Years ago, when data storage was more expensive, the cost was a consideration, but today, data storage is nearly free and should not be a major concern.
Images should never be scanned at less than 300DPI for reflective snapshots. 35mm slides can store up to 2400DPI on film, so scan accordingly or regret it later.
On preview, I see mhendo expressed similar thoughts, except:
Good quality is possible, yes. But to a purist, all JPGs lose something. Don’t mess with it. With free data storage, why try to save space?
Yes, exactly! So my next question would be, should I return the film to a new slide casing, or just store in a plastic archival sleeve without the casing?
Musicat, you’re right, size is not an issue, I want all the scans to be as high a quality as possible - but not so big that my computer takes 3 minutes to save it (I’ve had some 10,000 pixel plus wide images that slow down my computer when I save).
Regarding TIF - I have stayed away from TIF so far because it seems to me that only certain graphics programs open them, and they are ones that most ordinary people would not be likely to have (i.e. Photoshop, etc.). So I have been doing PNGs which as I understand is lossless but at the same time open in most programs and web browsers and it seems more widely used. Am I just making this up in my head, or would PNG be an acceptable substitute to TIF?
As far as the slide goes, i guess it depends on whether you need the casing for projection, etc.
As for TIFs, any decent image editor should be able to open them. Photoshop, obviously, but also Paintshop Pro, the GIMP, etc. Regular old Windows Picture and Fax viewer will open them, and if you have MS Office, the Document Imaging program has no trouble with them either. If you want to view them in a browser like Firefox (or IE, Opera, Chrome, etc.), you can download the free AlternaTiff plugin.
The main purpose of TIFs, though, should be to serve as your main archival storage form, not to be the format that you share with other people. If you’re sharing your images, especially on the web where people will be viewing them on computer screens (at a mere 72 dpi), then JPEGs are perfectly acceptable. Also, loading a bunch of hi-res TIFs onto a web page takes up a lot of space and will make life difficult for people with slower connections.
As for the TIF versus PNG thing, i can’t claim to be an expert. But i was always under the impression that PNG was designed more as a replacement for the GIF image type, and that its main use was intended to be for web graphics such as icons. It’s not clear to me whether there is any actual drawback to using PNG for digital photographs, but i certainly haven’t seen it done very often, and i don’t know any digital photographer who saves their files in this format for archiving.
These sheets appear to be a good way to save and organize 35mm negatives. But once you have inserted your negative strips, how do you view or print them en masse so you can sort the wheat from the chaff?
mhendo’s got it right – TIF should be your archive format, but reprocess to a smaller, more compressed JPG for common distribution.
TIF has been the standard for the professional art industry for 30 years. If you find the rare program that doesn’t read TIF, drop it. It’s not for someone who claims to be concerned with quality and archiving.
If you are having time & space storage issues with 3MB files, you may need to upgrade your computer system. I frequently use a 10 year old '98 machine for a lot of my stuff, and it is fast enough (but not big enough) to handle reading & writing multiple TIF files. I just processed a page layout file with over 16GB of linked images and it took about a half hour of computer time which I didn’t find excessive.
If you have 10,000-pixel wide images, where are you getting those? A 35mm scan greater than 3600x2400 won’t gain any more data but it will balloon the file with wasted space. Or did you mean 10,000 pixels total? That would be a small file. I just don’t see the problem here.
A lot of misinformation of TIFF format in this thread.
It is not a single image format system. It is an image file wrapper system. Different companies use different formats encoded into TIFF files. I’ve seen RLE, Huffman coding, LZW, raw data, etc. inside TIFF files.
So you can encounter TIFF files that are encoded using a lossy system. There’s even JPEG style encoding in TIFF format available in some software!
Because so many companies use TIFFs in so many ways, there’s no guarantee that one program can read another program’s TIFFs.
The “most popular” TIFF formats are not lossy and can be read by many programs. But to be sure, check carefully the software you are intending to use.
In my experience, every bit of scanning software i’ve ever used that offers TIF, offers it as its lossless, archival file format. In such cases, the software will either save a TIF with no compression at all, or will use a lossless compression like LZW. This is especially the case on more recent scanners, since the LZW patent expired about 5 or 6 years ago.
Also, while you’re right that TIFs come in a variety of formats, and that not all TIFs can be read by all software, it has become much less common in recent years for incompatibility to be a problem, especially among the general population. Over the past couple of years, for example, i can’t recall running across a TIF type that could not be opened by ALL of my TIF-capable software.
I’ve found that the vast majority of TIFs in use outside of specialized professional settings come either with no compression, or with LZW. And these simply aren’t a problem for most software.
