I have a few color slides from when I was a kid

[Marthe48]

I'm going to try to use my scanner to make copies. I read that if the scanner is good quality, I might be lucky.
Has anyone done this? Any tips for a good result, or should I just hope for the best?
Thanks!

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. You'll have better luck with a scanner specifically designed

for scanning 35mm slides, because a regular flatbed scanner won't light them enough. Here is an article that explains how to set up a flatbed scanner for slides. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/easiest-inexpensive-scan-slides-flatbed-scanner/

Or you could buy a slide scanner. My dad, in his '90s, decided he wanted to scan all of his thousands of 35mm slides he'd taken since the '50s, so he bought a slide scanner and set to work. It was his big project until he became too ill to work on it, but he got a lot of them done before he passed away. If a 90-year-old guy with limited computer skills can manage a slide scanner, it has to be a pretty easy process.

[Marthe48]

4. I've only got about 12

so I don't want to invest in a lot of equipment. I'll look at the site you gave me. Thank you!

[notdarkyet]

2. I took my old slides didn't know I had, to Walmart. Developed fast and cheap into pics.

[Marthe48]

5. If my effort fails

I'll try WalGreens Thanks!

[CurtEastPoint]

3. I scanned in a bunch on my Canon scanner 10 years ago and they were great. It even had a ...

plastic template to hold them in place and it separated them into individual jpgs.

[Marthe48]

6. I'll let you know how it works

Glad you had good luck!

[OxQQme]

7. I did that with a decent 35mm camera.

I made a light box using white poster board.
I curved the back panel to reduce 'halos'.
Cut a rectangular hole in one side the size of a slide.
With some thumb tacks to position a slide up tight in front of the opening.
A 'daylight' fluorescent bulb shining down through an opening in the top of the box.
Place camera so the view finder is 'filled' with a clear image of the slide.
I then used the camera's timer to snap the shot so I wouldn't shake anything.
Click. Change slide. Click.
I had several boxes of slides from the sixties that Dad had taken.
They all came out just fine.

Transfer the images to your computer for editing.

Bob's your Uncle.

Here's a couple with no editing from the 50's.

My first car:
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My Mom:
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From later taken with a better camera:
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[Marthe48]

8. Awesome!

I might do this as a summer project with my grandkids. They both like science and projects with results. I made a light defuser box with disposable translucent plastic cutting boards. It worked well, but then my husband bought a better camera and we didn't need it. lol

[csziggy]

9. You've gotten some good advice

For just a few slides, it is not worth the investment in a good slide scanner. I've owned both dedicated slide scanners (a Nikon and an Acer) and flatbed photo scanners with slide/negative capability (an Epson) over the last twenty years. The one I am using currently is an Epson Perfection V800 flatbed with the ability to scan slides and negatives up to 8x10". It takes practice and good equipment to get good results.

It was worth my expense and time since I have been scanning family negatives and photos going back over a hundred and fifty years. The oldest negatives date to the early 1900s and we have some glass slides from the 1890s. Many of the negatives are larger than standard medium format negatives so I had to spend more for the larger format transparency capability.

The newer scanners are much better than the older ones in terms of resolution, dust & scratch clean up, and automatic color correction. I need to go back and re-scan many of the ones I did with the older scanners to improve the quality and resolution. Someday in my copious spare time (yeah, right) - there are thousands that need to be re-done.

For just 12 slides, I'd find a service to scan the slides for you - or try the method OxQQme suggests. Do check to see if you can find a service to do it locally - some of the ones send the slides off the India and you may not want to take a chance on that.

You want to scan the negatives at a high resolution - I scan my 35mm slides and film at 3200 dpi. That is high enough to get good quality prints at 8x10" or larger. Any higher dpi picks up more film grain and takes a huge amount more time.

[Marthe48]

10. And I sure appreciate the advice

I tried to scan 2 of the slides today. I checked for a slide setting on my printer (a Canon) but didn't see anything. The darker slide actually turned out better than the lighter slide, but neither was good. I think 2 of the slides are of my sister when she was about a year old. I will definitely get those converted for her birthday this fall.

It sounds like you are working on a giant project. My brother-in-law has been scanning family pictures and documents for many years. He added some to genealogy sites. It's always a treat when he shares pictures. I have a friend who was left the lifetime work of a WV news photographer, who was his cousin. Since my friend retired, he scans pictures whenever he can. The work stretches from the mid 50s until about 2000. My friend has been adding to the work by taking pictures of local buildings and streets when he is out driving. I recently joined a Memories group on Facebook. The owner is always asking for vintage pictures of Woodsfield/Monroe County Ohio. There is a lack of vintage pictures of buildings and places for sure. I think when we used film and cameras, for a lot of people, it was expensive, so they took pictures of loved ones, and not their town. At least in rural areas in SE Oh.

I have a couple of milk-glass positive photos (opalotypes) but they aren't of family members. When I did research to find out about them, I learned that there is a lot of interest in taking photographs using the very early methods. Do you think you'll ever have the ultimate scans, the way that technology continues to improve?

[csziggy]

11. Does your Canon have a back light?

We have two Canon scanners and one has an attachment to back light slides and negative. It does a decent job - about the same quality of my original Nikon dedicated slide/negative scanner - but does not have the superior software of the Epson V800 scanner.

I feel for your brother - we inherited my families photos and genealogy and my husband's family photos and genealogy. I made the decision to not post the photos to places like Ancestry - they take ownership and control. I had my own website from when I bred horses so now most of what gets posted are family photos. I prefer to keep control of the family photos though I will share them with people who are interested.

I've also shared photos and information with the Florida Archives. The town where my Dad grew up was a company owned town that was destroyed in the 1950s when the company wanted to mine the phosphate under the town. My grandfather and my Dad took photos of the town, mostly as background for family pics, from 1925 through the period when the houses were being moved out of the town, plus there are photos of phosphate mining from those years. The Florida Photographic Archives loved the ones I have already shared and I have more I need to take to them!

I think the technology is almost maxxed out - as I said before I don't try to scan higher than 3200 dpi because the film grain starts to show up too much. I began scanning slides and negatives before 2000 and the software is now what is making a huge different. Dedicated slide/negative scanners now have software that can eliminate the dust particles and reduce the apparent scratches. In addition, once you spend a little time with PhotoShop, their tools for repairing damage and cleaning up old photos is amazing.

The other part is storage and memory. When I first started I could not scan at high resolution because I simply could not store or process the bigger images. Now I have 32GB RAM, a 128 GB scratch disk (for PhotoShop to use while working with the images), and 6 TB of storage.

My main problem is time and worrying that I won't live long enough to scan everything and get it organized!

[Marthe48]

12. I think my husband bought an accessory

to look at negatives. Or slides. I want to look at his stuff to see if I can find it and use it. . I still don't have the heart to really get into looking through his things. He passed away about 15 months ago.

My brother-in-law created family pages, one for each side. I don't think he shared a lot of things with whatever group he used. I am not diligent, but sometimes work on genealogy for my family. I have a birthplace, and family names, and have been looking now and then to learn more about my Dad's father. Smith is a common name My husband had a Smith on his mother's side and we were joking about being distant cousins. Great that you were able to share your family pictures with the state archive. That would make an interesting documentary.

I read that Bill Gates said, 'Who'd ever want more than 4 mgs of memory on a home computer?' hahahaha We fooled around with computers since we got a Commodore 64. I ended up with a good job working from home. My husband retired at age 55 and absolutely loved computers, the Internet and all the gadgets. He'd find articles and read about how to do something or use an accessory and then do it. At one point, we had 5 computers online for 2 people. I've got plenty of memory and still have 4 computers, a notebook and a Fire that are usable. Luckily, I don't have as many pictures as you have. I got part of the family pics, and my sister got the other part. I wish I could get some of the ones she has and I'm sure I have some she'd like. I think someone started dividing the pictures and gave up pretty quick. I can't make any sense of why I have the pictures I have. I started scanning them last winter, concentrating on pictures that are damaged or fading, and sometimes, finding something so fun, I have to share it. My mother-in-law passed away last Oct. and I am storing her things. I was glad that John's brother and his wife sorted the pictures and took the ones they wanted. There are still plenty left for other family members, if they want them. If you have most of the family pictures, it is probably easier to make sense of the history and who's who.

[csziggy]

13. The Canons that can scan slides come with the attachment.

It plugs into the back of the scanner to provide power for the light. I wore out the Canon that we had - I liked it better than the Epson we had at the time since it did a better job of OCRing documents. The big oversize multi-function Epson we got to scan scrapbook pages added better OCR capability.

I have quite the array of scanners and printers - a Brother laser printer that can duplex (print on both sides of the page), the Epson V800 that can scan large format negatives and slides, and the massive multi-function that can scan 11x17", print 13x19", and has an automatic document feeder for the mass quantities of paper I run into. The last one is my color printer and I may have to replace it since the printer head is clogged. But I printed a dozen or more books out of it (did a collection of photos and info about my sister that passed away in 1993 for her kids and a bunch of other stuff) so I got my money's worth out of this refurbished printer!

Since we pretty much have all the photos and documents for both my family and my husband's we can organize them nicely. I've gotten so I can recognize family members across all the years of their lives and have identified people who were unnamed in some of the pictures. Just today I sent messages to people who have cousins of my Dad in their trees on Ancestry. We have photos that their families may not have and I'd like to share them.