Converting 35mm slides to Digital

The local cycling club has come into possession of a large quantity of slides which were taken back in the 60’s.

Whats the easiest way to convert these into a digital format?

Scan them, the best scanners will have a slot in the lid for you to place the slides in. Then it’s just time.

Not sure on the exact model but my dad (who spent most of the 70s, 80s and 90s taking slides) has something like this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HZXLI9Q/ref=asc_df_B01HZXLI9Q57304137/?tag=googshopuk-21&creative=22146&creativeASIN=B01HZXLI9Q&linkCode=df0&hvadid=310997752985&hvpos=1o5&hvnetw=g&hvrand=5513756286958720343&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9045341&hvtargid=pla-577181274471

Yup, that^^^ will do nicely.

Easiest – take them to your local friendly photo lab (not Boots) and ask them to do it.

If they’re any good then you’ll get a better result that way than scanning them yourself unless you’re prepared to put a lot of effort in. But it will cost.

Unlikely you’ll need to scan all of them properly; ten percent if you’re “lucky”.  If you can get hold of a DSLR, you can get impressive scans using a backlight (see YouTube) . Invert them and set white balance using your fav editor (I find Shotwell does it better than Photoshop, and it’s free).

I’ve had a slide scanner for years. The ads refer to ‘high resolution’ which is only one aspect. My scanner really compresses the dynamic range, ie, tI lose detail in both the dark areas and the light areas. If you want good images look at the number of ‘bits’ of colour, not just megpixels.

My only experience of commercial scanning was Fujifilm, who offered to scan your slides when they developed them and send you the results on a CD, The quality was worse than scanning them myself.

Pay someone else to do it – it takes ages and ages to DIY.

I’ve done a few hundred using a decent quality flatbed with a slide adapter. That’ll manage 4 at a time but results are variable, it takes forever to scan, and even longer if you want to make adjustments, remove dust etc. Then I want to tag/date them all.

I still have a couple of thousand to do. Maybe a winter project….

Most of those cheap ‘slide scanners’ are pretty poor image quality. It’s not really a scanner, more like a crappy webcam in a box.

You could get a proper slide scanner, eg from Plustek. It can give very good results. Though can be rather slow. Especially if you want to tweak each image.

I found a load of slides and a projector… I digitised them by projecting them onto my wall and taking a photo with my digital camera 🙂

Here’s my dad and Buster as a pup.

Chew, as @Greybeard says you’ll get a lot of compression of the tonal range going from slides to digital via a consumer level scanner. You need to take at least two scans at different levels then combine the output and that takes time. I’ve a fairly decent scanner,  Plustek, cost £200+ or so a few years ago but you need to do quite a bit of post processing to get the best out of its output. Let me know if you want to borrow it.

Out of all my slides I had just one professionally scanned: to scan from slide to 5×4 negative and print two 15″x12″ prints was over £50 in 1986 😲There’s detail in the print that I just can’t get with my scanner – and I’ve tried.

Cheers Bob, probably take you up on that offer.

Meeting up with them tomorrow to see the quantity and quality of the slides. Dont mind a bit of post production and quite happy with them looking a bit faded.

Could also try the projector method