Old Slides

I'm starting to go through a load of old slides from about 1990 - 1995 taken with a pentax sfxn and sigma 28 - 50mm and 50 - 210mm lenses and am looking for advice on slide/neg scanners. The one I'm using seems to give a blue cast and blow out the centre of the photo. I realise I can't make a silk purse from a sows ear but I'm sure there may be one or two worth keeping

A couple of samples:

[IMG]http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g406/tyronet2000/2012-02-13_12.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g406/tyronet2000/2012-02-13_9.jpg[/IMG]

Looks about right for a lovely day out in the Swiss Alps. All of first the ones I took in Austria had blue casts to them. The I bought a super UV filter, much better than sold in the UK at the time and they came out much much better.

Is the illumination a hot lamp. This can cause the slide to pop then refocusing would be needed.

But I suspect it is LED, if so they tend to be a very small point source which could tend to be concentrated in the middle. If the latter you may also need to change the wavelenght a bit as I understand LED light is very blue, so trying a UV filter between the LED and the slide might work.


regards
Bernard

Thanks for the reply. I'm sure you are right about the led light source, the scanner is powered by the usb port. I think my best course of action is:
A) Dig out the slide projector from the loft and if its working sort the slides first, I doubt there will be as many to be kept as the time taken to scan them all
B) Dig out the light box from the loft....as above

Theres always the chance that the emulsion has changed colour a smidge. Certainly the ones I took on Ektachrome back in the 70's don't have the colours I think I remember and some in the vibrantly coloured Flower Market in Saltzburg are now distinctly muddy (unlikely I would have kept those if they'd been as bad as they are now.

I think it's likely down to how they've been stored. In my case in the cupboard under the stairs (dark, but not always the coolest part of the house as the oven in the kitchen backs onto it)

Bernard

You might find this link useful

http://thesybersite.com/minolta/slide-copying/index.htm

There's also a dust and scratch removal tool at the bottom of
the page that will work with Kodachrome. I've just downloaded
it and passed it through twenty virus scanners and it's
100% clean. It's an installer made by Polaroid.

Gregmoll has an article on this site somewhere about how to
set up a Pentax bellows for copying slides, but you need the
bellows and slide holder. I think he used a normal cold bulb
in a tin with a hole cutout for the light source.

I bought a cheapo slide scanner from Maplin when they opened locally (£19.95) and I'm pretty impressed. The biggest trouble is that the software is junk, won't work on XP Pro with the latest updates so I have to use an old laptop and make sure I don't update it by mistake. It might be better on Vista (that's not something you hear often) or Win7. The actual device is a webcam, so it's very quick to scan the image. You can set whether you're scanning colour negatives, slides or mono negatives, to cut out that last step of inverting negs.

I couldn't say I've noticed much trouble with the colour, but these are also very old slides, 25+years.

[IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a149/hpfirenza/slides/2010-12-04_12.jpg[/IMG]

The problem is that there are two fundemental types of 'scanner' on the market, and they work very differently and give totally different results.

The first is the cheaper type such as that mentioned above. These really should not be called scanners as they are not! They are (effectively) small cameras which take a photograph of your slide/negative. The quality will never be high as what you have effectively done is taken a picture witha 35 mm camera with a good lens then re-photographed it with something akin to a very cheap compact camera with a miniscule lens.

The second type are proper scanners. They scan the negative and, depending on the model and mode, will probably do a number of passes with differing levels of illumination to produce a high quality image. The downside is that rather than taking a few seconds per scan it may take a few minutes.

I use a Plustek - there are a few models but the main difference appears to be the software. They are not the most expensive (The Nikon scanner is around £3,000 but can scan in seconds) but not cheap either - around £200.

The alternative is to go for a specially designed flatbed scanner. I've heard that they can produce excellent results but take much more work to get right.

The two scanners I've got... Nikon LS-30 and Olympus ES-10 are both very slow. Photographing the slides with the Pentax-M bellows and slide adapter is very quick. Using a K-5 with highlight and shadow protection would probably make life easier.

There are also dedicated slide scanners, this one works like a slide projector, and by what I have read does a decent job:

link

I would hope it does an excellent job at €1599.00 which is way above what I could afford but thanks for your input

Yes, you are right, it is expensive. I am planning to rent one for a month to scan my slides.

I also use a Plustek scanner with Silverfast 8 software.

The software has a special setting for Kodachrome slides to automatically remove the strong blue cast.

The software is very sophisticated and you can make numerous tweaks before the final, multi pass scans are done.

Scanning is not particularly quick, whcih is not a problem for me as I am only planning to digitise selected slides.

LED lights can be at any colour temperature.

I do believe you are absolutely correct but I'd been told (and I've read it somewhere on this forum[I think it was Gartmore or Don - apologies to each if I'm mistaken]) that LED lighting is bluish and looks better (not necessarily more accurate) if a bit of warmth is added.

It was with this understanding I was trying to suggest a reason for the blue cast on the slides

regards
Bernard

I am in the process of scanning some slides taken at "ground level" from the Englischer Garten, Munich and will see what the colour cast is on them, a bit "greener" I hope