Slides to digital

[S3ute]

Hello from Brisbane.

I’m presently going through a couple of hundred boxes of slides that I took between about 1972 through 1985. I’d like to capture a good many of them in digital format, but the numbers are fairly overwhelming. Ditto the apparent cost which seems more appropriate for small numbers.

Is there a viable option for bulk converting slides to digital?

Cheers,

Neil

[Epic_Dragon]

Hello :) something like this is probably the cheapest option QPIX Negative Slide Converter | Officeworks (https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/qpix-negative-slide-converter-bcmdfc1400)
You can then convert them at home, at your own pace. I am actually wanted to get one of these too in order to convert my parents seemingly endless number of slides. So many memories to save :)

[p38arover]

I have an old Nikon LS-1000 slide scanner which is incredibly slow which puts me off doing any bulk work.

I also have a couple of commercial Konica scanners but both have failed which is disappointing as they'd take rolls of negatives (I used to buy bulk negative 35mm movie film, load film canisters, and get slides made from the negs). The slides made from the negative film have faded over time, unlike my Kodachrome and Extachrome slides, so I was hoping to get good digital copies from the negs. The colour negs have been sealed in movie film canisters.

All of the above are SCSI devices (as is my flatbed scanner).

Oh, if you need software to run old stuff like this with Win 7, 8, or 10, download VueScan VueScan Scanner Software for macOS Catalina, Windows 10, and Linux (https://www.hamrick.com/)

[JDNSW]

I have a similar device, and it works, although the quality is not perfect (but then most of the slides aren't either).

But there is no escaping the fact that it is a lot of work if there are a lot of slides.

I scan them, then carry out any necessary fixing up using The GIMP software, label them with date and an explanatory title, and file them, with a backup on a separate portable drive. I've been at it in my spare time for years!

[austastar]

Hi,
If you can get 1:1 with a digital camera it is way quicker. You will need a tripod, something to hold the slide (bulldog clip will do) and a white background lit by a good led torch. A darkened room will help reduce flare.
I could only do 100 slides a day on a scanner.
Cheers

[101RRS]

I have a similar device, and it works, although the quality is not perfect (but then most of the slides aren't either).



I have converted quite a few slides and yes the quality is not perfect with lots of dirt and marks - was going to look for a solvent to clean them up before scanning and some sort of software to to quickly clean up the scanned image.

Garry

[p38arover]

I have converted quite a few slides and yes the quality is not perfect with lots of dirt and marks - was going to look for a solvent to clean them up before scanning

I use a puffer/lens cleaning brush to pre-clean the slides.

More modern software will remove a lot of the dust marks.

In the end, who wants to see my hundreds of slides of aircraft?

[p38brickus]

Hi,
If you can get 1:1 with a digital camera it is way quicker. You will need a tripod, something to hold the slide (bulldog clip will do) and a white background lit by a good led torch. A darkened room will help reduce flare.
I could only do 100 slides a day on a scanner.
Cheers

I do the same only a little more agricultural. I hold the slide up to the light outside with my fingers. I'm not too worried about being perfect because the resultant picture can be cropped to the correct size. It's surprising how many you can do when you get used to the method. When I start my computer I do a few while things are warming up, it's a discipline thing.

[AK83]

If you want quality reproductions, nothing beats a modern digital camera copy, in it's native raw format.
I guess it depends on what digital camera system the OP has at their disposal.

I have a Nikon system, and got myself an old slide copy bellows for the Nikon F mount(which also has the side benefit of being a lens extension system for high magnification photography too).
I found an old Nikon PB-4 bellows, with slide copy attachment, which holds the negatives at a preset distance from whatever lens works best for you, and allow you full coverage of the slide. Hold both mounted and strips film.

And depending on the quality of the exposure of the film, this allows you the hands free operation where you can then dodge and burn the reproduction as needed. Having a properly exposed reproduction to begin with, then allows you the latitude to post process the file to taste too.

The most important aspect is the ability to set a proper whitebalance setting for the film too.

Are the films negative or colour? If negs, then it's easy to set up a batch process to covert them all to colour.

I tried a few other methods, quite expensively an Epson scanner ... but not really impressed with the results.

While this isn't a "bulk method" for doing the conversion, I set myself up for it to be a hobby to do it as time allowed.

Mum had a suitcase full of Kodakchrome slides from their early years in Aus, which I wanted to convert, and tested it out on my small collection of films and negs.
When I went to collect the suitcase of films from mum, turned out the stupid sister threw them all out about a month prior!

[BradC]

Hello :) something like this is probably the cheapest option QPIX Negative Slide Converter | Officeworks (https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/qpix-negative-slide-converter-bcmdfc1400)

Mum did a couple of thousand of my Grandfathers slides using one of these. She just had a pile on the side-table next to the couch and would run them through whenever she had nothing else to do. It wasn't particularly that model, but similar and wrote straight to SD card.


In the end, who wants to see my hundreds of slides of aircraft?

<Raises hand>

[123rover50]

Hello :) something like this is probably the cheapest option QPIX Negative Slide Converter | Officeworks (https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/qpix-negative-slide-converter-bcmdfc1400)
You can then convert them at home, at your own pace. I am actually wanted to get one of these too in order to convert my parents seemingly endless number of slides. So many memories to save :)
Whats a negative Slide Converter?
Does it copy from the actual slide in its cardboard frame or does it copy from the film strip.
I have boxes of half frame slides I took with a Canon Demi back in the 60,s of my travels in OZ and PNG but not looked at them since. This may be an option.

Keith

[JDNSW]

The "slide copier" I have has also does 35mm or Instamatic film. Whether they are colour, negatives or slides is a matter for your image processing software rather than the digitising device.

I have done quite a few of my half frame slides.

I have some other formats that present issues I am still working on - I have a large number of 120 and 620 negatives dating back to the 1920s, a significant number of 75x75 slides, and a few strips of 16mm negatives.

[AK83]

Whats a negative Slide Converter?
....

At the risk of stating the obvious, you get film in both negative and postive(slide) types.

Negative film(the most common type for just getting regular photo prints) needs a layer of processing to revert it back to human understandable colours.

So if you "take a photo" of a negative film frame with a digital camera, it's still a negative.

If you shoot this negative in jpg mode on the camera, the reversal process in software looks 'ugly'(relative term), but if using camera raw format, can come up really nice, and with some basic manipulation came end up looking even nicer than a standard lab print of the negative too(ie. my reference to dodge and burn whilst photographing the negative). And once the negative has been captured and in your preferred editing software, further processing if needed can reveal even more detail again.

Overall, using a half decent modern digital camera in raw format allows a ton of editing leeway if you're after getting the most out of a particular film.

The process of film reversal is very easy to do. I think I remember that some software even have a one click step to do this, but doing it manually is also trivially easy, once you do it once or twice.
If you know about software editing, then you know of the histogram(levels and curves) tool. Usually the levels curves tool shows a linear/direct gradient line, from low darks/blacks to high highlights/whites.
You grab the lower end of the gradient and lift it to high, and then grab the high end of the gradient and bring it back to low levels. The end result is that the previously linear gradient will then look like a sinewave curve.
This will then invert the once negative digital image into a colour corrected version. Once you have the corrected colour, it will almost certainly have a way off white balance(mine were all blue, which is to be expected), and I then used a click to whitebalance, click on a white/grey/black point in the image and it transformed from this blue colour image into a nicely balanced colour image.

From what I can understand with this QPIX devices, they seem to capture in jpg only. There is no mention in the manuals of any option for file format.

So this negative slide scanner machine has the option to do the colour reversal itself, which saves some time in doing those processing steps in software.
But in saying that, the only time you need to selectively do this colour reversal step is if you change the light source used to shoot the film with your camera.
Once I got my reversal process to my liking, I saved it as a batch edit process, and then applied it to all images I wanted reversed.

[p38arover]

If you want quality reproductions, nothing beats a modern digital camera copy, in it's native raw format.
<snip>
I have a Nikon system, and got myself an old slide copy bellows for the Nikon F mount(which also has the side benefit of being a lens extension system for high magnification photography too).
I found an old Nikon PB-4 bellows, with slide copy attachment, which holds the negatives at a preset distance from whatever lens works best for you, and allow you full coverage of the slide. Hold both mounted and strips film.

I run Pentax DSLRs (currently K-mount - bayonet) but I have a bellows from my days of running Pentax screw mount. I have an adaptor I bought at the time I bought my first Pentax K-mount film camera in 1989. I'll give it a go.


Mum had a suitcase full of Kodakchrome slides from their early years in Aus, which I wanted to convert, and tested it out on my small collection of films and negs.
When I went to collect the suitcase of films from mum, turned out the stupid sister threw them all out about a month prior!

I was annoyed when I found my sisters had turfed my parent's photo albums. I particularly wanted the photos Dad took in Darwin after the Japanese bombings. I wanted to pass them on to the Australian War Memorial. (Dad was there as part of the Civil Constructional Corps Civil Constructional Corps in Australia during WW2 (https://www.ozatwar.com/ozatwar/ccc.htm). He'd lost an eye as a child so couldn't enlist with his brothers.)

[p38arover]

I wasn’t looking but obviously Google was - this popped up in my YouTube feed tonight


https://youtu.be/LV9jsgBkGbw

I have a copy stand I made (at work) back in 1968. I have a K-mount macro lens.

I have a light box,

As an alternative, I have an M42 screw mount bellows - I might have the slide holder, too. I have a genuine Pentax M42 to K-mount adaptor which is much neater than the adaptor shown in the video. It looks like this:

187942

I need a way to hold film strips flat. I may have a solution to that in one of my non-working slide copiers.

My camera doesn’t have a fold-out screen so I’ll need to look into the viewfinder for accurate focussing. Fortunately, I have a right-angle viewfinder attachment.

187943


If I sort something out, I’ll post pics.

Oh, I do have Lightroom.

[123rover50]

At the risk of stating the obvious, you get film in both negative and postive(slide) types.

Negative film(the most common type for just getting regular photo prints) needs a layer of processing to revert it back to human understandable colours.

So if you "take a photo" of a negative film frame with a digital camera, it's still a negative.

If you shoot this negative in jpg mode on the camera, the reversal process in software looks 'ugly'(relative term), but if using camera raw format, can come up really nice, and with some basic manipulation came end up looking even nicer than a standard lab print of the negative too(ie. my reference to dodge and burn whilst photographing the negative). And once the negative has been captured and in your preferred editing software, further processing if needed can reveal even more detail again.

Overall, using a half decent modern digital camera in raw format allows a ton of editing leeway if you're after getting the most out of a particular film.

The process of film reversal is very easy to do. I think I remember that some software even have a one click step to do this, but doing it manually is also trivially easy, once you do it once or twice.
If you know about software editing, then you know of the histogram(levels and curves) tool. Usually the levels curves tool shows a linear/direct gradient line, from low darks/blacks to high highlights/whites.
You grab the lower end of the gradient and lift it to high, and then grab the high end of the gradient and bring it back to low levels. The end result is that the previously linear gradient will then look like a sinewave curve.
This will then invert the once negative digital image into a colour corrected version. Once you have the corrected colour, it will almost certainly have a way off white balance(mine were all blue, which is to be expected), and I then used a click to whitebalance, click on a white/grey/black point in the image and it transformed from this blue colour image into a nicely balanced colour image.

From what I can understand with this QPIX devices, they seem to capture in jpg only. There is no mention in the manuals of any option for file format.

So this negative slide scanner machine has the option to do the colour reversal itself, which saves some time in doing those processing steps in software.
But in saying that, the only time you need to selectively do this colour reversal step is if you change the light source used to shoot the film with your camera.
Once I got my reversal process to my liking, I saved it as a batch edit process, and then applied it to all images I wanted reversed.

Thanks for that, even though most of it was way over my head, the last paragraph answered my question. I am not into this high tech stuff. My digital camera is a small pocket one much like my Canon Demi and I find its all I need. I will look into this QPIX thing some more.
Keith

[p38arover]

I was at a friend's place today and mentioned this thread.

She gave me a slide/negative/photo copier to try out. The internet reviews are varied on this unit, an Otek PS979

Here are a couple I just did. I haven't done any editing or corrections, these are straight from the scanner. I suspect it's not a scanner but takes a photo of the image as it's too quick.

One taken in 1979 - I was baby-sitting our son. Colours aren't too bad.

187956

This one taken in 1970 at work in Ceduna early one morning. The colours are wrong, that should be an orange sunrise.

187957

The quality may be good enough for most of my slides. I need to try it on some colour photos and colour negatives.

[V8Ian]

I was at a friend's place today and mentioned this thread.

She gave me a slide/negative/photo copier to try out. The internet reviews are varied on this unit, an Otek PS979

Here are a couple I just did. I haven't done any editing or corrections, these are straight from the scanner. I suspect it's not a scanner but takes a photo of the image as it's too quick.

One taken in 1979 - I was baby-sitting our son. Colours aren't too bad.

187956

This one taken in 1970 at work in Ceduna early one morning. The colours are wrong, that should be an orange sunrise.

187957

The quality may be good enough for most of my slides. I need to try it on some colour photos and colour negatives.
Love the first photo, did Elisabeth take it as evidence of responsible father-son supervision? [biggrin]

[p38arover]

Love the first photo, did Elisabeth take it as evidence of responsible father-son supervision? [biggrin]

Yes.

Here's a black and white photo taken in the 50s or 60s. Not yet cropped to remove the carrier as it was a small photo.


187958

[p38arover]

I’ve added a few scans of aircraft over in the Flight area.

[scarry]

Did this one a while back,using a mobile phone.
Should do some PP,but haven't bothered yet.

Fraser island late '60's.

https://www1.picturepush.com/photo/a/16690613/640/16690613.jpeg (https://picturepush.com/public/16690613)