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digitising slides

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Tinman57:
Software for use with a scanner: see brahman's review: Review/Tips: "Scanning - VueScan and Associates" Pt.I: Intro & Bookscanning.

Flatbed is what's usually used for reasonably high-quality scanning of negatives or slides - but dont the better ones use a holder as opposed to just laying the negatives directly on the glass?
(No, I've no experience here either :p)
-tomos (July 09, 2013, 02:24 PM)
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 The scanners with the negative plates (holders) is basically to put the negative in the exact place it needs to be during the scan and keeps it straight.  The negative still makes contact with the glass, or at least mine did....

elvisbrown:
I am part way through this process for the third time! I am 63 and have spen the biggest chunk of my life involved with photography. Before digital it was all film based so I have quite a large collection of mainly negatives and but some slides.

I said for the third time so I will detail the roads I went down and didn't pan out. I am not including flatbed scanners because when you are faced with literally thousands of negatives they are just not practical because the amount of remedial work is too much.

Dedicated Scanner.
Some years back I bought a dedicated negative slide scanner, it was a Pacific Image model and worked well. It produced high resolution images and the colour fidelity was pretty good. So why did I stop using it? Here are the 2 things that this whole process revolves around.
1. Scan time: this one took around 1 minute per scan.
2. Post scan remedial work (scratches, dust marks etc). The software (Silverfast) had a steep learning curve and even then left much to be done manually.
Conclusion: It was taking too long and there still too much manual intervention required.

5MP Cheap Flash Scanner
The scan time was mere seconds but the results were less than good most of the time. There was no post scan software supplied so that just left a lot of manual intervention.
Conclusion: Simply not practical for a thousand negs

20MP Flash Scanner
I waited a few years after the cheap flash scanner but never gave up the quest. When I saw the 20MP Wolverine on Amazon I took a punt and bought one. When comparing the results for the same negs with the cheaper 5MP scanner the results were obviously so much better on the 20MP model.

Software
I also came across AKVIS retoucher which really solved the post scan problem. It removes scratches and dust with minimal effort and really works. Simple, no steep learning curve and acceptable results.

Conclusion: These 2 together are a practical solution for what I am attempting.

Unless you are a professional photographer (in which case you would stump up $8000+ for a top notch scanner) what you really need is some process that is do-able for the number of slides/negs that you have. In my case of a thousand or so negs there are a handful that are really precious to me. For those really special ones you can send them to a lab to get scanned. You obviously would not be able to afford that for the bulk but it is horses for courses.

Finally. In looking over my the photos I have taken in my life so far I was really shocked to discover that there have been really important people in my life that I have either no photos or only one or two bad quality snaps. Record your friends and lovers while you can!

Tinman57:
Finally. In looking over my the photos I have taken in my life so far I was really shocked to discover that there have been really important people in my life that I have either no photos or only one or two bad quality snaps. Record your friends and lovers while you can!
-elvisbrown (July 09, 2013, 05:05 PM)
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  I hear that.  I went through all the same thing, but years ago before there was more specialized apps.  A fair amount of times I'd have to go into "Touch-Up" mode, but I solved a lot of those problems with plug-ins for my photo editing software, one of them iPhoto Plus 5 all the way to version 8, which actually lost some useability from Vs 5.  I've had quite a bit of graphics software going back to the C=64 days.  I pretty much turned it into a hobby even before I started using a PC.  I've scanned hundreds and hundreds of pictures as well, which calls for more touching up depending on the condition of the picture, and most all of mine were family photo's that went back into the 1800's.  I spent a lot of extra time with those and damn near have them all as perfect as they'll could ever be without taking out the antiqueness.

  Needless to say, no matter which way you go, it's going to take a lot of time and effort to get it right, and one way or another, if your serious about getting all your family/friends pics digitized, your going to have to make it a hobby.......

IainB:
Maybe I should mention the EPSON Perfection V330 Photo Scanner.
I posted about it here: EPSON Perfection V330 Photo Scanner + ABBY and ArcSoft software

I'm fairly pleased with its slide and photo-scanning, and the bundled software is good. I mostly use Picasa to manage and edit/clean up the images.
One caveat is that you can't necessarily guarantee that the colour you see on-screen on your computer's display will be what others see on their different screens/displays. Standard colour tones output from the different brands of display drivers may differ quite significantly.

superboyac:
I've been using an epson perfection scanner and vuescan (thanks brahman, epic review!) for a year now.  Very smooth, very nice.  Haven't done any slides yet though.  it comes with plastic holders for slides.

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