Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: Kit-V on October 25, 2019, 12:42:42 pm
-
I hope this is the appropriate sub-forum for this topic. I have several boxes of 35mm slides that I would like to have converted to a digital format. I know that there are several labs that can do this. But can I get a recommendation on who might be able to do this at a reasonable cost?
Thank you.
-
"Reasonable cost" is a complex variable.
If you have access to an interchangeable lens camera, it's easy to photograph the slides with a macro lens. It's easy, fast and the quality can be excellent.
Scanning is labour intensive and takes forever, hence the high cost. Only a super expensive scanner will produce a better digital image than a good camera.
There used to be services available that utilized offshore labour to scan slides, but I'm not sure if they're still operating.
If you're converting the slides to digital, they probably have some value. I wouldn't feel good sending my originals overseas somewhere.
-
Thank you, Peter. The slides truly have sentimental value. Then the question becomes....is the intrinsic value of the slides worth the high monetary cost of shipping them off to a lab?
However, your idea of simply photographing the slides just might be brilliant. Yes, I have a Canon 6D with a 100mm macro lens. I assume that an illuminated viewing tray would be essential. Unfortunately, mine somehow disappeared when I switched over to my first DSLR. But I am sure there is an alternative that I can fabricate. Of course, please feel free to pass on any thoughts that you might have.
Thanks again!
Kit
-
I photographed about a 1000 slides over a few nights. I just set up the projector beside the camera on a tripod. I had a remote in each hand. Click projector, Click camera, repeat. I did about 300 per night.
Once digitised and labelled you can decide if any are worth going a step further to scan. Most were not.
-
Thank you, Peter. The slides truly have sentimental value. Then the question becomes....is the intrinsic value of the slides worth the high monetary cost of shipping them off to a lab?
However, your idea of simply photographing the slides just might be brilliant. Yes, I have a Canon 6D with a 100mm macro lens. I assume that an illuminated viewing tray would be essential. Unfortunately, mine somehow disappeared when I switched over to my first DSLR. But I am sure there is an alternative that I can fabricate. Of course, please feel free to pass on any thoughts that you might have.
Thanks again!
Kit
Nikon has this adapter that is designed for their 50mm lens with an extension tube.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/37453-REG/Nikon_3213_ES_1_Slide_Copying_Adapter.html/?ap=y&ap=y&smp=y&smp=y&lsft=BI%3A514&gclid=EAIaIQobChMInNDNtry45QIVFZSzCh3_ZQv7EAQYASABEgJfpvD_BwE
You can check if it can be used for your Canon lens. Or may be there is a third party one that is universally compatible.
-
i can only agree that to make a photo of a slide with a macro lens is the way to go.
You have to set it up and the lightsource behind the slide has to be have good colour properties. ( stable and full spectrum - so good led quality or museum grade light))
once that s done it is a matter of labour.
Todays digital camera's and lenses are so good they easely get all the information out of the slide.
I use a d850 and the 85mm pc nikkor @ f11.
-
Thank you everyone. I think you are onto something! There are several ideas that come to mind.
Kit
-
My approach to film to digital...……………………………………...https://pbase.com/tojo123/image/162598013
-
A simple flash and diffuser setup would work. Aim the camera at the flash, once you get the exposure dialled in, away you go.
You can even do focus bracketing for bowed slides.
-
How many slides is "several boxes"? Are you looking to print any? What do you intend to do with the digital images?
-
I probably have about 20 boxes of 140-slide carousels. My plan is to import them into Lightroom, do whatever post-processing is necessary & then either output them to a thumb drive or wirelessly project them onto a smart TV. I opted for the Nikon ES-1 Slide Copying Adapter ($49) which seems to be easily adapted to my Canon 6D w/ 50mm 1:1.8 lens.
-
I did something similar when I moved. Especially after the slide projector broke. I used an Epson V600 scanner and made adjustments with PS Elements and Lightroom. I then use PS Premiere Elements to make slideshows with music, titles, credits etc. My early "shows" were saved as 1920x1080 onto DVD's. But now with UHDTV, and adding digital movie clips at 4k, I'd make slides to match 4K or the equivalent of 2180 pixels high. (UHDTV's are 3840x2160 pixels) Then store on memory card to playback directly on the smart TV through the USB jack. I don't bother with DVD's any longer. If I want other including relatives to see it, I download the video to Youtube. YOu can set it up so it's private. That way the public can't see it. Only friends and relative you gave the access code too. This is a good method for digital slide shows as well.
You can skip Premiere videos and just make a simple slideshow without music, narrative, captions etc. And let the TV or other program just show the slides in sequence like your projector use to do. But frankly, jazzing them up in a video program makes them more interesting to watch before people fall asleep or fake a headache and say they have to go home early.
One other thing I'd like to suggest. Although I didn't have as many carousels as you had, I still found the quantity pretty overwhelming once I got into it. EVen with ICE in the scanners which takes out most of the dust spots left on the images after the scan, there was still a lot of cleaning up to do. Getting the colors right, exposures, etc became overwhelming. So I decided to cull a lot of pictures. I went through each carousel eliminating duplicates, bad shots, and stuff that just did not have to be preserved. That saved a lot of time. Film scanners are made to spot out the dust, and even automatically set the colors and exposure correctly during the scan correcting even faded slides if you have them. I've never done camera copying so others would have to add their comments how to handle that if you use their process. Whichever process you use, make sure you really review the final result on a dozen or so images. You don;t want to do the whole batch and realize you missed something important and have to start over. You'd rather blow your brains out then do that, I assure you :) It's going to be a learning process. Be patient with yourself. I didn;t get it right the first time and still make mistakes.
Here's a sample of a video I did of 35mm slides. It's called Scuba Diving Key Largo... It's one of the first one I did. SOme of the white are clipped I think either because of the process I was using or the film exposure itself. I decide I didn' want to redo everything. That's why my previous suggestion of getting the first dozen shots a perfect as you can. You don;t want to re-do stuff. It's too frustrating. The other slide shows on that link I used digital pictures and also some short video clips in some also (Fire Academy movie). But these should give you an idea of the benefits of creating videos of your slide shows. But you of course have to start with the digitizing slides. Good luck. YOu might want to post a few of the first dozen to get feedback before you continue with the rest of the scans or duping.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDzogShfhgCHh2rVvEsFOJQ (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDzogShfhgCHh2rVvEsFOJQ)
-
With a project like this export it to a thumb drive is very doomed. Don't do it. Get a real external hard and export to that. I am speaking from experience.
-
+1 Absolutely on the "real" hard drive.
Thom Hogan says you can get 5TB for $100 now. That should hold most of your slides. :)
-
Yes of course you have to back it up. All the slides as well as the video program process is saved on a hard drive connected to the computer. The memory card is just the final "published" material that is used to show the slides on the TV or another computer. You don;t delete all the original stuff of the computer and HD backup. You may want o back it up to a second HD or to the cloud if you have that. If they're short enough, you could make DVD's to give to relatives or even memory cards which are pretty cheap these days.
-
+1 Absolutely on the "real" hard drive.
Thom Hogan says you can get 5TB for $100 now. That should hold most of your slides. :)
Peter's right. HD's are cheap today. I'm on my second Western Digital (WD) Passport. The first was 2TB and I now am using a 4TB. It's plug and play and works in the background invisibly. It plugs right into the USB with no AC power requirements.
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Passport-Portable-External-Drive/dp/B01LQQH86A
-
However, your idea of simply photographing the slides just might be brilliant. Yes, I have a Canon 6D with a 100mm macro lens. I assume that an illuminated viewing tray would be essential. Unfortunately, mine somehow disappeared when I switched over to my first DSLR. But I am sure there is an alternative that I can fabricate. Of course, please feel free to pass on any thoughts that you might have.
If you have lots of slides, loading them into a camera frame one by one is going to get tedious pretty fast. I have the transparency adapter for my Epson Expression 1640XL (discontinued, but I'm sure they have a replacement) which can shoot 30 35mm slides at a time. The resolution is fine for projection for slide shows, cataloging, etc. and when I have a slide I'm interested in scanning at higher resolution, I load it into my OpticFilm 7600i slide scanner (with SilverFast software) and scan it at higher resolution.
-
With my Epson V600 flat bed scanner set at 2400 and 48 bits, it takes about 3 minutes for the scanner to do the scan of 4 slides. Double that if you're adding ICE for eliminating dust spots. This does not include the time to prepare for the scan, cleaning the slides, putting them in the holder, cleaning the glass platen, removing from the holder after the scan, scratching your nose, etc. That takes another few minutes. It adds up. Then you have the post processing time to clean up any dust missed by ICE, tweaking colors, exposure, etc. If you do video slideshows like I linked to above. that's another ballgame.
How long does "scanning" take using a camera?
-
I probably should have clarified myself. I will import all of the images from my SD card into Lightroom. The images will remain on my internal drive which is backed up onto an external drive. To display the images on a TV, I will upload the images to a thumb drive. Also, I can give a thumb drive with the images to my daughters.
-
Scanning slides with a flatbed scannner is faster, but it lacks the dynamic range to get everything out of the dark area's.
The digital camera can do this and you can adjust the exposure (I make 3 exposures -1, 0, +1) to get everything out. Also it has a vey high resolution about 5800ppi for the d850 with a lens that can do the job.
The good thing is also that you never have to scan that slide again because you have all the slide's information.
( and slides change colour after some years- my worst are the ones i framed under glass- Kodachrome is one of the sharpest films , but i mostly used Agfa because i liked the colours best.
With the knowledge i have now i only would have used Kodachrome since you can change colour in photoshop)
-
DO NOT use thumb drives for photo images. Class 10 SD cards might work. Your talking about 2800 photos.
-
Scanning slides with a flatbed scannner is faster, but it lacks the dynamic range to get everything out of the dark area's.
The digital camera can do this and you can adjust the exposure (I make 3 exposures -1, 0, +1) to get everything out. Also it has a vey high resolution about 5800ppi for the d850 with a lens that can do the job.
The good thing is also that you never have to scan that slide again because you have all the slide's information.
( and slides change colour after some years- my worst are the ones i framed under glass- Kodachrome is one of the sharpest films , but i mostly used Agfa because i liked the colours best.
With the knowledge i have now i only would have used Kodachrome since you can change colour in photoshop)
Ah, if I only knew then what I know now.
How much difference is there between scanning at +1 and the shot at 0 offset compared to using a Shadow slider equivalent in post? In other words, is the data really there in 0. It's just that you have to pull it out.
-
Although I am working with medium format negatives, I found my Canon 100mm L macro adapted to a Sony a7rii (surprisingly) produced digital files that are as good as my old Nikon 8000 scanner's files. But the process is much slower. The only reason I am not using my Nikon 8000 is that the USB to SCSI adapters I bought don't work. (It looks like I'll need to buy a cheap PC box with a SCSI board to have a reasonable probability to using the Nikon scanner.)
Paul
www.PaulRoark.com
-
Although I am working with medium format negatives, I found my Canon 100mm L macro adapted to a Sony a7rii (surprisingly) produced digital files that are as good as my old Nikon 8000 scanner's files. But the process is much slower. The only reason I am not using my Nikon 8000 is that the USB to SCSI adapters I bought don't work. (It looks like I'll need to buy a cheap PC box with a SCSI board to have a reasonable probability to using the Nikon scanner.)
Paul
www.PaulRoark.com
Hmmm... I still use my Nikon 8000 scanner and... it's a firewire interface, not USB or SCSI. It works well with my MBP with the thunderbolt/firewire adapter cable and VueScan software. I haven't tried it with my HP z820 workstation, but that has built in firewire and I'm guessing it would work well there as well. I think it would be not so expensive to find a used HP z800 with firewire built in and use that to operate the scanner. Or just any old Mac with thunderbolt and the firewire adapter cable.
-
There is fairly comprehensive site about scanning slides using a digital camera:
https://www.scantips.com/es-1b.html
-
Thank you, Slobodan. I will definitely read through it.
Kit
-
... I still use my Nikon 8000 scanner and ... it's a firewire interface, ... . It works well with my MBP with the thunderbolt/firewire adapter cable and VueScan software. I haven't tried it with my HP z820 workstation, but that has built in firewire and I'm guessing it would work well there as well. I think it would be not so expensive to find a used HP z800 with firewire built in and use that to operate the scanner. Or just any old Mac with thunderbolt and the firewire adapter cable.
I use PCs, that may be part of the problem. I did not find any recommended adapter that could successfully go from USB to Firewire. To stay in the PC environment I'm familiar with, I bought an inexpensive Lenovo Windows laptop that had a Thunderbolt port. Then what I found is that I still seemed to two adapters in series to get to Firewire.
It sounds like it might be worth my time to explore the "MBP" adapter. I had concluded from my experience that I'd probably be stuck needed to get a cheap Dell PC box with a Firewire board, and that route did not thrill me. (I do have the VueScan software.)
Thanks for the info.
Paul
www.PaulRoark.com
-
The MBP firewire to thunderbolt adapter should work. I think the Best Buy stores have them. Used to cost $30.
-
Hi Paul,
"I did not find any recommended adapter that could successfully go from USB to Firewire."
Not sure, but I believe this is what you are looking for. I just did a Google search and this is the first page with quite number adapters. Here's the link -- https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=firewire+to+usb. Hope this helps.
Gary
-
Thanks for the suggestions.
I suspect the Apple Thunderbolt and Lenovo Windows Thunderbolt are not the same thing. I may try more of the suggested approaches, but my frustrations at this issue are not the only ones. See, for example, https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-Yoga-Series-Notebooks/Is-yoga-900-USB-Type-C-Thunderbolt-3-compatible/td-p/2266371 -- "I have tried several Thunderbolt 3 docks with my yoga 900, and none of them work."
Paul
www.PaulRoark.com
-
Thanks for the suggestions.
I suspect the Apple Thunderbolt and Lenovo Windows Thunderbolt are not the same thing. I may try more of the suggested approaches, but my frustrations at this issue are not the only ones. See, for example, https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-Yoga-Series-Notebooks/Is-yoga-900-USB-Type-C-Thunderbolt-3-compatible/td-p/2266371 -- "I have tried several Thunderbolt 3 docks with my yoga 900, and none of them work."
Paul
www.PaulRoark.com
My apologies. I thought you were looking for an adapter to accommodate USB to Firewire, which is referenced in the link I sent.
-
My apologies. I thought you were looking for an adapter to accommodate USB to Firewire, which is referenced in the link I sent.
No, you're right that what I'd most like is to connect from USB to Firewire. My main computer is a Microsoft Surface Studio that has only USB ports. Unfortunately, I failed to find a way to do that successfully in my first efforts. So I bought a cheap Lenovo that had a Thunderbolt port. Various posts suggested that Thunderbolt could, via adapters, connect to Firewire. It didn't work.
There are a few people who seem to have succeeded in connecting to these old but good Nikon scanners via USB and adapters, but it's not simple. See, for example, https://www.flickr.com/groups/74221125@N00/discuss/72157656937372512/72157679522372041
My efforts were put on hold after I found my Canon 100mm L macro + Sony a7rii (using a Beseler enlarger in my still existing darkroom) could equal my Nikon 8000 scans, but it's more work.
Paul
www.PaulRoark.com
-
I did check the link to the forum you mentioned. One fellow suggested not to use an adapter. Apparently he uses a cable - USB to Firewire, which of course is also an adapter. What can I say? An adapter is an adapter. However, he may have a point there, since I imagine the cable version might be a bit more stable, not sure. Otherwise I don't understand why it would be such a problem using the adapter route. They are not expensive, so if it doesn't work it's not much of an investment. I'm on Mac Pro 2012 which only has Firewire 800 ports, so I found an adapter for Firewire 400 (Nikon Scanner) to Firewire 800 (Mac Pro) and it works exactly as expected. My main issue is with VueScan. I have scanned some of my old Kodachromes on my Epson V-750 through Silverfast and so far I have not been able to produce as sharp a scan on the Nikon SC 4000 with VueScan. I'm hoping to find and correct the reason for that issue, because I do believe the Nikon would produce a better scan than the Epson. Of course Nikon dropped the support for the Nikon scanners many years ago, and even though Silverfast offers a Nikon version as well, it is very pricey. Guess I'll just have to continue with VueScan and perhaps eventually solve the sharpness issue I am up against. As far as the Canon route is concerned there seem to be some very positive reasons for trying that if possible. Nikon offers and adapter for some of there lenses for shooting slides. Since I shoot Nikon I cannot say if Canon might have such a devise as well, but I think it might be worth the search Paul.
Otherwise, good luck with your "darkroom" setup as you described it.
Gary