Way back when, many of use chose to shoot slides followed by putting them in carousels and projecting them on a screen. This made sharing with a large group of people really easy. This was one way that photographers could take pictures while saving on printing costs. The nice thing was that only the best of the photographs could then be printed. Flash forward to 2020 and they are now just collecting dust.
Saving The Memories – Slides – is all about deciding what to do with those hundreds/thousands of slides that now fill up a closet or two.
Slides are memories of important family moments or vacations. Some folks will opt to keep the slides and pass them down to other family members. Others will want to keep the memories but not the physical slides because they take up too much space and they are never watched. Scanning is an option that will allow for saving the memories while being able to have them printed or put in a Digital Frame. Some Commercial Services charge anywhere from .10 – 1.00 per slide and the amount you will spend can add up very quickly. Some services might charge extra for color correction or sharpening each slide. If this is the path you choose to follow, then have them do a sample piece prior to giving them your whole collection.
I had all of my slides Commercially Scanned and was really disappointed. There was no color correction and they included part of the frame which makes wanting to print selected slides a bit difficult unless I take them into a photo editing program such as Photoshop Elements. Having slides Commercially Scanned will give you more free time to do other things. This also means that you can put your memories in a Digital Frame pretty easily since all you will need to do is copy them from the DVD that is returned with your order to the Digital Frame.
Commercially Scanned slides (at least from the vendor I used) may come back looking just like the original but maybe darker due to the age. Depending on the vendor or the optional available, they may not come back color corrected or sharpened. The one nice thing is that they used a high DPI/Resolution which makes it a lot easier to work with.
Here is a revised picture from the Commercial Scanned slide with only a quick sharpening and one photo enhancement that took less than a minute. If I were going to print it, I would certainly spend a lot more time working on the photo.
Another option is to scan the slides yourself on your time table and save a lot of money and the quality will possibly be better. I’ve used two different slide scanners and both created a desirable output.
After scanning the slides I will take the ones that I either want to print or put into a Digital Frame through a photo editing software, such as Photoshop Elements. It’s really easy to do quick fixes such as enhancing the color and sharpening the picture.
The Magnasonic All-in-One High Resolution 22MP Film Scanner that has the capability of scanning; 35mm, 110, super 8 film, slides, and negatives. It creates .jpg files that can be stored on a memory card followed by taking that card and put into a computer or Digital Frame.
The second scanner is a Pacific Image Prime Film 35mm & Slide scanner. It uses its own proprietary software that has many optional settings. The one nice thing is that the software has the ability to scan in many different DPI/Resolution settings. The files can be saved in .jpg or .tiff format. I tend to scan at 4800 or 6000 so that I might use the Slides/35mm Film in all kinds of projects.
I found some misc. slides that I’m now scanning and saving followed by tossing out the slides so that I can remove the clutter.
Prior to doing anything, ask your family if they are interested in taking the slides and if they don’t want them maybe select some slides of important events and have them scanned. Then save on a DVD followed by giving each family member a copy so that they may have the memories to pass onto the next generation.
For those who wonder what Photoshop Elements looks like, here’s a quick look at the first lesson of a tutorial that I created several years ago.
Saving The Memories – Slides, Photography, Sandy Moniz, Sandy Moniz Traveler Author Imagineer, RV Living, Photoshop Elements Video
