Slide scanning

I have a load of my granddad’s slides and negatives I’d like to scan.

I’m at the point where the cost of a cheaper slide scanner breaks even with the cost of sending them off to be scanned.

Typically the reviews at this end are suitably varied, does anyone have any experience of any?

I had 1400 slides professionally scanned and results were amazing. I have no idea how long that took labour wise but it would have driven me into an early grave doing myself, best £500 I ever spent!

Consider this.

You can buy a cheaper slide scanner if you want. The resolution will not be as good as getting them professionally done and you will have to put in a good number of hours to actually do the scanning. I have done it. The process is nice at first but soon becomes a real chore and rapidly becomes something you want to get over with. I didn’t even have that many to get through.

Personally if I were in a similar situation I would pay the money for a professional service. The results will be way better than you would achieve and you wouldn’t sink a good proportion of your time into doing it. The end result would be a collection of digital images that you are fresh and ready to look through.

I’m at the point where the cost of a cheaper slide scanner breaks even with the cost of sending them off to be scanned.

Then what next?  If you’re likely to get more slides in the future then a scanner may be a worthwhile investment.  If it’s a one-and-done then you’ve just expended a load of man-hours to achieve an inferior result and are stuck with a lump of plastic in the cupboard.

I bought a Veho slide scanner with a view to scanning in a load of slides from my childhood and earlier, then selling it on.  The results were rubbish, I got bored after about a dozen and gave up.  Assuming I can find it you can have it for postage costs plus a donation to a charity of your choice if you like, but I really would advise against it.  Sending them off to a professional seems a no-brainer to me if the cost is similar.

Dissappearing down the rabbit hole that is slide / neg scanning… ooh!

For home scanning, as an absolute minimum, you will need one of these:

https://plustek.com/us/products/film-photo-scanners/opticfilm-8200i-se/index.php

You can get hold of one for around £300-400. This scanner (I have one) will provide sharpness and resoultion very close to that of a professional lab (I still shoot film, so know what a good professional lab scan looks like). Any cheaper scanner than this will produce very poor quality scans

There are a few caveats though

* Each high resolution scan will take around 60-90 seconds, depending on the speed of your PC. You will need to scan in RAW format, not jpeg.

* You also need to add in slide / negative handling time, dust blowing etc. – this is not inconsiderable, just aligning the slides / negs pefectly in the carrier is sometimes a bit of a faff. For me to scan a roll of 36 images takes around 45 mins. It gets tedious really quickly.

* You need to import the image files into photo editing software of your choice – don’t even bother using the native ‘Silverfast’ software these scanners come bundled with to edit the images – it’s crap. So you will also need a subscription to Lightroom, or something similar.

* You will then need to crop and rotate the images – they are never perfectly aligned in the scanner – then you need to edit the image files so that they actually look good, which takes a bit of practice and skill. The images straight out of the scanner always look rubbish, unfortunately.

* In the case of negatives, you will also need to purchase a plug-in for Lightroom – such as Negative Lab Pro – that allows you to ‘invert’ the negative image to a positive. Again, the native bundled Silverfast scanner software is rubbish for this. Once you have inverted the image, it will need further careful image processing (white balance, shaprening, contrast, brightness, highlights, shadows, dust removal, etc. etc.) to make it look okay

* In the case of slides, these will also need careful editing in Lightroom to make them look okay. Slide scans (due to their inherently high image contrast) are really inflexible for processing, which makes this part quite a delicate art.

I easily spend another 1 hr + editing a roll of 36 images, so you are probably looking at 2 hours of faff per film roll.

In short, you could get really frustrated and practically lose the will to live at any stage during this process. It is a bit of a rabbit hole.

After these glowing reviews of the process, I think I’m pretty sold on the lab route then. If I was churning through a load of slides or if they were inspirational * I’d maybe invest. For the couple of hundred, it sounds like a lab is the best bet.

I’ve been slowly working through his old photos, scanning and cataloguing and retouching in lightroom and Photoshop, the slides are the last images I have to work on before I delve into the world of pain that is his 8mm cinifilm.

Thanks for the thoughts.

*It appears the art of composition was lost on my ancestors, squint horizons, missing feet, people cut in half were common practice.

If there are many slides with ‘interesting’ compositions , it could be  worth getting a slide viewer and making an initial cull before sending to a lab?

I made my own slide copier – attached to the front of my camera. I set the camera set in macro mode and shine a daylight bulb onto a white wall. Works surprisingly well but I wouldn’t want to be doing too many slides.

My dad surprised us with some pretty good images taken from slides about 15 years ago
He’d set up his projector and screen and simply taken a photo of the image on his little handheld Canon ixus.
Which explained the slightly wavy and tilted results, but much better than nothing.

New day, new thought, I’m half tempted to buy a cheap led lightbox and try digitising them that way . I have a Canon R6 and a 100mm macro upstairs with extension tubes.

I also tend to have spare time in the evening while the kids are asleep.

I’m scanning using a lightbox, film holder from ‘essential film holder’, dslr, macro lens a tripod and tethered to lightroom. It’s quite a faff as you need to make sure everything is aligned and keep dirt, stray light and vibrations out. On the plus side the results in raw mode are excellent. Now I’ve got the process sorted, it’s about 20 minutes to set up, 1 minute per negative scan and then I’ll spend 5 minutes a photo processing in lightroom and negative lab pro. All very therapeutic and slow in a film related way. I scanned in several hundred of my dad’s this way and got excellent results.

I have a similar problem. Anyone got any recommendations for professional slide scanning companies out there, as it does seem the DIY route isn’t going to be viable?

I’ve scanned a few hundred of a few thousand slides I have (not even started on film negatives yet).

Yes, the setup/cleaning/post-processing takes ages, but I tend to be selective about the latter. I reason that having a digital copy of any sort means that I can always return to it later. Managing the EXIF data is another chore of course. I try to be as accurate as I can about dates, even if it’s just year and month (or even season). My slide collection isn’t too bad for this as they tend to be boxed appropriately. One of the reasons I’ve delayed on negatives is that they’ve been scattered and randomised a bit.

I’ll see how the set up goes and report back.

I like the convenience of sending them away but think I’ll enjoy the process, I’ve scanned 200 photos and repaired 10 in Photoshop getting rid of creases, folds and tears.

The first stage when I did this was get a cheap viewer.

Hoi all the ones that have no meaning* away. That’s 90% gone.

*”Oh look a pretty landscape snapshot of somewhere I have never been and have no idea of where it is, which must have been quite fascinating during a post holiday slideshow with a narrator explaining, but it now, alas, just a pretty landscape”

Living in a city I just took them to a local place (A&M Imaging) in Edinburgh. I just took them the slides bundled by film and date and gave them a 2TG portable drive to put the scans on.

For anybody in the Glasgow area I have used this guy for scanning a few slides. Good quality and cheap as far as I remember.

http://www.photoscot.co.uk/info/scanning.aspx

Update:

So i ended up buying a £20 LED lightbox from amazon, I tethered my camera (Canon R6) with the laptop with 20mm extension tube on my EF100mm macro. the camera was vertical on a tripod with a 3 legged thing ultra plate used ensure i got a smidge more than the whole frame in. A couple of hours later i have 115 slides and negatives copied. now just to tweak and catalogue them in lightroom and share the files around the family.

here’s a quick sample of Concorde before i upload to lightroom / tweak

Overall not to bad a process, cheaper than sending them away as I have a decent camera to start with, half the pictures aren’t modern day sharp either so i’m happy enough with the results, thanks for the thoughts / inspiration