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There are hundreds if not thousands of copies of these 100 slides for sale on the internet. I would like to turn them into digital images, but I feel like after decades of selling these as souvenirs, they must exist in digital format (to buy or for free). Rather than scanning these slides at a walmart, I would like to purchase the images instead.
I think the issue is there is no easy way to convert slides into .JPGs or .PNGs, AFAIK.
There's no machine to put them in.
I doubt projecting them and taking photos would produce decent images.
They sell machines for $55-$150 and you can convert them at Walmart for 50 cents a slide +$5.00 overhead. Which would be fine for personal photos. But the files that I have seen for scans of old photographs from the 1970's were hundreds of megabytes big. So they were very large to put in Power Point presentation or something similar. They fill most of a CD, and most computers don't have CD drives anymore.
I also don't think the Walmart will convert these slides as they are labelled as commercial products. I suspect the photos were taken in the 1950's by Kodak, so I would presume they are in the public domain, but I just can't find them anywhere.
I think the issue is there is no easy way to convert slides into .JPGs or .PNGs, AFAIK.
There's no machine to put them in.
I doubt projecting them and taking photos would produce decent images.
Most scanners will accept slides or negatives, it's the ideal way to scan since the negative or slide is backlit.
I would suggest a scanner with Digital Ice or similar tech especially negatives and slides. Digital Ice is hardware based dust removal. Software by itself can work well to automatically remove dust and other imperfections but in the end it's just guessing. Is it snow flakes or a scratch on the image?
A scanner with Digital Ice does two scans, one of them is with infrared that will identify physical imperfections on the surface of what you are scanning such as dust,scratches, fingerprints etc. This isolates what is going to be corrected with the software.
This one is usually recommended for the DIY selfer.
But the files that I have seen for scans of old photographs from the 1970's were hundreds of megabytes big.
Whoever was scanning them was probably using .bmp which in a sense is actually good becsue it's lossless format. At the very least they should be converted to .PNG or .TIF which use lossless compression method. That should cut the size of the .BMP in about half.
You can convert them too .JPG as well with very little quality loss, the file will be roughly about 10% of the original file size. One thing to keep in mind is .JPG is variable, keep the quality at least 90%.
Whoever was scanning them was probably using .bmp which in a sense is actually good becsue it's lossless format.
Well it was a lossless format, but the photos were crappy instamatics taken without any skill. So I had a perfect reproduction of a lousy photo, and I couldn't make a slideshow out of it.
Well it was a lossless format, but the photos were crappy instamatics taken without any skill
.BMP, .TIF and .PNG are all lossless however .TIF and .PNG use a lossless compression method. You can cut those file sizes in about half on average. Irfanview if you are unfamiliar with it does batch processing, you can covert whole folders of images:
When scannin the DPI settings need to be adjusted based on the physical size of what you are scanning. The smaller it is the larger the setting. A really good 35mm camera using good film etc is going to be the equivalent of 16MP at most and could be as low as 4 or 5MP with cheap P&S. For photos how well they were reproduced by the lab plays a factor too. Here is some general settings:
4*6 -600 DPI or 800 max.
8*10 - 400 DPI or 500 max
35mm or slide - 3000DPI or 4000DPI max, or whatever the max optical resolution of the scanner.
Keep in mind these settings will allow for huge prints assuming high enough quality images. The first ones are practical, the second ones are the limits. Anything higher just creates a bigger file.
As far as the printer that's the way to go, if you are going to do this do it right because it's very time consuming. I've been researching this for many years, that printer has actually been around for many years. It's middle of the road, good features and not outrageously priced. Think it was in the $450 range when I first started researching. It was recommended to me by a professional photographer.
I have literally tens of thousands of photos and I have been kind of waiting to pull the trigger. I really want to get something with automatic feed and if it will do 8mm film I'll do dance.
Buy a slide projector. That's what transparencies are designed for, and the image quality on a large screen is miles above anything you can imagine digitally.
Your cost for buying the printer is just step 1. It's the cost of the ink cartridges and paper that will bankrupt you, especially w/ large prints. I was so happy when I kicked my inkjet printer onto the lawn and set up my darkroom! If you're scanning the photos themselves and not slides or negs, a flatbed scanner will do just fine, and keep the rez down to around 200 or you will pick up the texture of the paper itself. Trust me, it will look awful. So whatever size your prints are, that's what size your scans will be. Only if you have a neg or slide (and you should have a good dedicated film scanner for 35mm, not a flatbed) can you get larger sizes.
Last edited by smarino; 01-07-2016 at 10:35 PM..
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