Slide Scanning Help

Hello all! I'm trying to help my mother digitize her slide collection. She's been wanting to do it for years but has not been successful. She has around 5500 slides (mostly fujichrome velvia) and is looking into various slide scanning services. I have talked her out of doing it herself but she's worried about sending all of her slides off. Would anyone care to share an experience they've had with a particular slide scanning service? I'd be very interested to know. Some are cheap, some are expensive, but they all claim to do a great job :). Thanks!

Doing it yourself requires a true film scanner. The adapters on flatbed scanners just don't work. You can get an idea of what a picture ought to have looked like, but they aren't anywhere near as sharp as they ought to be.

A film scanner will get good sharp scans off your slides and negatives, but it's tedious. Each slide takes as long as 90 seconds, depending on your scanner, and then you want to dress it up just a little in a photo editing package because the color won't be perfect, or it'll be just a tad dark, something like that.

If you've got Kodachrome it'll be easier. Kodachromes archival stability means the colors will still be çlose to true. Old Ektachrome, on the other hand, will show serious fading of yellow and cyan, leaving mostly magenta images.

I really can't tell you about services because i decided to take matter into my own hands when Dad passed and it became time to digitize his slides. I bought a Nikon film scanner on eBay, and when i upgraded to a Windows 7 PC i had to buy software to run it because Nikon's software wouldn't run on the 64-bit Windows 7. I use Vuescan, paid for the full "pro" version, and it's worth every penny. I've done about 2500 of Dad's 4500 slides, pretty much ignoring stuff we can't identify. Some countryside shot in Arkansas, stuff like that, became a "who cares?"kind of thing. Family shots were scanned, of course, and family locations like houses, cars, and whatnot.

Here's just a couple of samples. The first two are Dad in the Navy, 1952.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-T...n%25207-52.jpg https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-z...o%25207-52.jpg

Here's the first family home after my parents were married, 1957:
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-d...2520Lawton.jpg

Those were all Kodachrome. Here's what you might run into with Ektachrome. (Yours Truly early 1958.)
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-C...unrepaired.jpg

I was able to use Photoshop's color balance controls and level controls to repair it to this, but I'm not sure a service would be willing to put that amount of work into it.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-m...20repaired.jpg

It's time-consuming and tedious, but I get what I want out of the slides, rather than what someone else was willing to get. Film scanners are expensive, but so are scanning services. You can't go wrong with any of the nikon scanners you'll find on ebay. I work on them a few hours in an evening every once in a while. It'll take months to finish, but you'd spread out sending to a scanning service over time, too, to spread the expense.

Thank you for the detailed reply. I believe she has an old scanner but I don't know if she has the time / know how to use it. Do you trust any company to do it for you? I just don't know which way is the better route.

Check out FINDTHEBEST.COM and search for slide scanning services.
Check out HUBPAGES and search for slide scanning articals by DPSDAVE. Explains what the trade offs are.
Lastly, organize before you scan. This will force you to sort out the bad ones, and will end up saving you a lot of time or money.
-Dave

I have an Epson Perfection V500, and it has done a marvelous job in scanning my old slides. In fact, all of my mother's old Kodachromes look fantastic for being close to 60 years-old. Thankfully, this scanner incorporates a really nice software program, and came with Photoshop Elements 6.0 (PE) when I purchased it. Many of her old slides were in need of being "cleaned up" and PE was able to remove a lot of dirt and mold specs. Sadly, hundreds of old Ektachrome slides have faded out completely and were not viewable.

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Originally Posted by USRoute12

I have an Epson Perfection V500, and it has done a marvelous job in scanning my old slides.

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Great scanner, use one myself. Although I do need to upgrade to a V700 so that i can scan in 4x5.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by USRoute12

In fact, all of my mother's old Kodachromes look fantastic for being close to 60 years-old [snip] Sadly, hundreds of old Ektachrome slides have faded out completely and were not viewable.

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That's the power of Kodachrome, it is the most stable colour film out there, why? Because it's a B&W film at it's base, each layer of the emulsion is chemically bonded to the colour dye, so during the process the dye will attach in the appropriate layers to create the colour image. It's what made the "K" process so long, so tedious, and so environmentally unfriendly. If stored properly, you'll start to see some fading after 100 years in the yellows. Ektachrome however being a regular colour slide film "E" process will not be as stable and does fade.

I have a Plustec. I also had a V500 but the plustec does a better job with color slides. It came with Silverfast. Which is a very powerful software and loaded with video tips on how to use it. It really is a good value for the price.

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Nice information thanks guys