Digitizing Film Slides

[Pathfinder]

Well, the GF-1 does not work well with the 80mm lens - too long a focal length to get the entire slide covered.

I have an order in with CamaraQuest for an Olympus Zuiko lens to Canon EOS body adapter. A full frame DSLR should match up better with the 80mm - I will get back to you as I learn more.

Oh, you do not have to use a flash, but can simply use the sun to directly illuminate the slide in the slider holder, since the slide, lens, and camera body are all on the same focusing rail. Set white balance to sunlight.

 

[Michael Slade]

I use the flash b/c I am looking for consistency, a small f/stop and the ability to copy slides whenever I want. True, you do not have to use a strobe, I just chose to b/c I have about six of them. It is interesting to note that even with the strobe's perfectly predictable color temperature, I have had to adjust the color balance on the slides more than I would have thought. I am shooting with a white balance of 5500k.

 

[Frankspinz]

My family had a few 1000 slides. We viewed the lot a tossed out many that were not relevant. The remaining 600 or 700 i sent to a Montreal photo shop for scanning. I was very peased with the results. And at 50 cents per slide well worth the coin... My time is more valuable than that...

 

[DiploStrat]

I have done at lot of them which you can see on my website. These two galleries are all scanned slides:http://www.pbase.com/diplostrat/sahara and http://www.pbase.com/diplostrat/bolivia76

The latter set are newer slides and show less damage due to age, etc.

I used, and would recommend:

-- Nikon Coolscan V ED
-- Vuescan software This software is much, much better than anything Nikon makes and allows you to scan once/adjust many, which saves time.
-- Adjustments were done in Aperture, but in extreme cases, you could use Photoshop to repair damage.

Expect to spend between five and fifteen minutes per slide. I try to simply get a clean scan out of the scanner (think negative) and do the final color restoration, etc. later.

All were scanned to 100 MB TIFF. The originals then went into archive boxes.

Best wishes!

 

[Michael Slade]

Look great man. Scans are really clean and also cleaned up. Very nice job. I wonder what film was used? Ektachrome? They all look slightly blue-ish and green-ish in an 'old Ektachrome' kind of way.

EDIT: Just looked at the captions. Kodachrome 64 eh? I had a lot of blue in my original scans till I warmed them up a little in Lightroom. It helped the colors a lot and gave me a much more neutral 'Kodachrome-ish' palette, the one I was expecting.

 

[Pathfinder]

I just received my copy of "The ViewScan Bible" by Sascha Steinhoff which was just released a few weeks ago.

Quite a worthwhile resource for users of VueScan.

 

[DiploStrat]

Thank You!

Although I have just about finished scanning my slides, looks like a great read. And, judging by some of the posts here, I should set up my own scanning service.

 

[4x4x4doors]

They are currently enroute to SlideScanning Pros.
Decision to use them was based on price (including no surcharge for handling carousels), comfortable feeling (yes, you may call it a hunch) based on communications with them, the work gets done in this country and choice in storage media (portable HD).
Their timeline was also a bit faster than some of the others I checked. This was not a factor in the decision but was kind of nice.
I'll update as things happen.

I said I'd update as thngs happen but haven't been good about that. The slides are done at 4000 dpi. I have seen the jpegs of the scans but not yet the tiffs. They posted them on a password-protected website album for us to look over as work progressed. The wfe and I have viewed them all online. They cleaned up nicely, no dust or scratches. Out of 3800+, there appear to be a dozen that I wouldn't have bothered with (either because the original developing left a crappy slide or because it was just a bad shot of nothing) scanning. There are probably another 2 dozen that I may work to adjust the brghtness on because I know what the picture SHOULD have been (as in "I remember there's a bear behind that tree").

All in all I'm quite pleased with the results and would recommend this company. They did take a little longer than I thought they would but nowhere nearly as long as it would have taken me.

Samples can be seen in message #11 in this thread. The ones earlier in that thread were done via Frankentstein-Rube Goldberg methods Icae up with.

 

[Michael Slade]

If any Nikon shooters want to pick up the same setup that I used, there is a good clean unit here in SLC for sale pretty reasonably priced.