First you edit. Åctually, I edited as I went along, pulling out a page of slides from the drawer and selecting the ones worth bothering with. Then you decide how big you will want to print (always scan for the largest possible output, so you don’t have to do it again). Then you look in the checking account and see whether you can afford a modern or used dedicated film scanner. If you can, you either buy a new one, or look on eBay for any of the Nikon or Minolta ones. Nikon and Minolta ones are old now, at least 10 -15 years. They predate USB, but some of the Nikons still use FireWire. None of them is supported by their manufacturers. (I went through two Nikon LS4000s. The motherboards died. There was no repair option.) Once you’ve decided whether you wish to invest in that you research online services. A popular one is called ScanCafe. If you decide to do it yourself, you set aside 4 hour hunks of time on a regular schedule so you can concentrate on the task. If you decide to do it yourself you invest in Bombich Software’s VueScan ($35) since the sortware that came with the scanner doesn’t run under modern OSs. The best scan is as close to RAW as possible, so you can then use your software to process the scan to your liking. Avoid any kind of interpolation. Either get a scanner that will make the size scan you need, or pay someone who has one to do it for you. As you work your way through your slides, you make certain that you can embed in their file headers all the keywords, captions, dates, locations, people’s names, etc. you might wish to search on some day to locate the files later. You also develop a naming protocol, so you have no duplicate filenames when you’re finished. My end goal was a processed tif. I aimed for a 55M tif. My files were 4000dpi by film size. They are about the size that my current DSLR produces. Simultaneously with all this you must also be running timed automatic backup software on your computer and a couple of backups for your accumulating scans. I promise you, once this is finished you will not want to have to do any part of it again because you didn’t backup adequately! While I was doing this I also scanned my negative film. Although the scanners came with little gizmos that fed the film strips into the scanner, I opted to clip each piece of film out of the strip, mount it in a slide mount and scan it with the appropriate scanning settings. The scanner did the color inversion. I had a large number of slide mounts because I discarded all the film I did not scan. Plastic slide mounts were nearly all reusable. Cardboard ones went into paper recycling. The film went into the trash. I marked each slide mount with the date and filename and now store them in hanging slide pages in a file cabinet. Much to my amazment I found a buyer for the excess slide mounts on eBay. That’s it. It’s a real time sink, and you need to commit to doing it with care and common sense. _________________ Emily L. Ferguson mailto:elf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 774-392-0022 New England landscapes, wooden boats and races http://www.landsedgephoto.com |
