Digitalizing old photos to create slideshow?

[coralmommy]

Hi Everyone!

I'm new here. I hope I've come to the right place! Pictures are my passion.

I would love to digitalize all of my old photos and create slideshow. Once I figure that all out, I'd like to start doing slideshows for family and friends as gifts, and my ultimate dream is to start my own small business creating slide shows of old (&new) photos for special events.

I know that I will need a quality scanner, but I have no idea where to start. Honestly, I don't even really know the complete process involved.

Can you give me advice/suggestions on where to begin?

Thanks so much!

[jorgemonkey]

I recently did that for my family for Christmas last year. I took old photos my dad had taken while we as kids were growing up, and the photos my grandparents took of their family when they were young & created a slideshow. Here is how I did it:

(Now I've been inspired to get photos of my setup, since I can't find it now Hopefully I can get photos of it this afternoon)
I've got the Nikon bellows set, which has an optional slide copying adapter. Using my D70 on the bellows, and my SB-800 on a sync cord as my light behind the slide. I'd shoot RAW so I have a digital negative if I screwed something up.

Then using photoshop I'll go through and do all the usual edits; cropping, straightening, blah, blah.

I did my slideshow with ProShow Gold. It is a very easy program to use and now that I've gotten used to using it, I can create a slideshow that matches the music & has different transitions in a matter of minutes.

Version 2 of digializing old photos now is I've got the Epson 3590 flatbed scanner. Its by far not the world's best scanner for slides/negatives, but for what I'm currently scanning in it is perfect. I'm scanning in a bunch of old photos that I've taken and most likely wouldn't ever get printed again. The scanner has an auto feeder so you can scan in strips on negatives at once and different resolutions/sizes.

Again, after getting them scanned in I edit & use Proshow Gold to create my slideshow

[coralmommy]

I recently did that for my family for Christmas last year. I took old photos my dad had taken while we as kids were growing up, and the photos my grandparents took of their family when they were young & created a slideshow. Here is how I did it:

That's exactly what I'd like to do!

(Now I've been inspired to get photos of my setup, since I can't find it now Hopefully I can get photos of it this afternoon)


[QUOTE] I've got the Nikon bellows set, which has an optional slide copying adapter. Using my D70 on the bellows, and my SB-800 on a sync cord as my light behind the slide. I'd shoot RAW so I have a digital negative if I screwed something up. [QUOTE/]

I don't know what any of the above is...I guess I have a lot of research to do. I would also like to figure out how to get old slides onto DVD.

I did my slideshow with ProShow Gold. It is a very easy program to use and now that I've gotten used to using it, I can create a slideshow that matches the music & has different transitions in a matter of minutes.

I checked out the ProShow Gold website. It looks so fun! I'm getting excited!!!

Thanks so much for your reply jorgemonkey!!!

[freygr]

Hi Everyone!

I'm new here. I hope I've come to the right place! Pictures are my passion.

I would love to digitalize all of my old photos and create slideshow. Once I figure that all out, I'd like to start doing slideshows for family and friends as gifts, and my ultimate dream is to start my own small business creating slide shows of old (&new) photos for special events.

I know that I will need a quality scanner, but I have no idea where to start. Honestly, I don't even really know the complete process involved.

Can you give me advice/suggestions on where to begin?

Thanks so much!

Most likely just any old scanner will work for prints. But for negatives it's a different ball game. I have an old Epson 1200U photo scanner and it will scan up to 4 by 5 inch film (negatives) it's only 1200 dpi but most fixed focus 120/620/127 cameras scanning at more than 1200 dpi is a wast of harddrive space! But there are inexpensive 35mm film scanners that come from Epson & HP and others as part of the flatbed scanners. Unluckily unless you can find a good used Epson 1200U photo scanner anything to scan film larger than 35mm is very costly.

I use 300 or 600 dpi scanning depending on the quality of the image. Please save your original scanned file before editing so you can always start over without having to rescan.

I've found that for slide shows that most projectors unless you spend a lot of cash are 1024 by 768 pixel resolution (TV standard not HD is 640 by 480 pixels and is over scaned). HD resolutions TV are much more than 1024 by 768, The 1080i resolution is 1920 × 1080. The media that is going to be used and which program you going to put the slide show together with does have a factor. For faster loading times you need to resize the images to the maximum resolution of the display device. I used a non-resized slide show and it took about 2 minutes to load but the resized images for the same show took less that 30 seconds to load and start.

[jorgemonkey]

[QUOTE=coralmommy]

I've got the Nikon bellows set, which has an optional slide copying adapter. Using my D70 on the bellows, and my SB-800 on a sync cord as my light behind the slide. I'd shoot RAW so I have a digital negative if I screwed something up. [QUOTE/]

Here is the bellows set that I have:



I would reccommend though getting a scanner to scan everything in. The only reason I have the bellows set is because my grandfather gave it to me

If you end up getting a scanner, don't worry about the RAW files. Those will only come from the camera.

On the stuff I've scanned in, like Freygr I scanned them in at 300-600dpi at a 4x6 size. They came out very good on a dvd slideshow. Using Proshow Gold you can burn the slideshow to a DVD