NancyS
08-18-2005, 04:54 PM
I was reading through happyrobyn's thread about which scanner to get and she mentioned having LOTS of old slides to scan. We bought a scanner specifically for doing the same thing, but in the end we didn't even use a scanner - and we saved a ton of time.
Disclaimer: I put this thread here with scanners, because so many people want to scan their slides, but if someone thinks this should be moved I sure understand.
Here's how we did it.
After buying the scanner, we found the entire task of scanning 2000+ old slides such a daunting task. We kept putting the project off because we knew how long it was going to take. One day *bright light* the lightbulb went on and we decided to try something that worked for us and hopefully works for you also.
We set up a slide projector - it was one of those carousel types. Then we set our digital camera on a tripod right beside the projector. For a screen we used a piece of poster board - okay maybe it wasn't called that, but I can't remember the name right now - but approximately 2ftx3ft. (We tried the regular slide screen we had with the sparklys on it. but it didn't work.) We felt that projecting the slides at a fairly small size gave better quality.
So then we just focused the camera and projector and clicked away. We set the camera to just go to the edges of the projected slide and nothing else. Clicked the camera, clicked the projector to advance one, clicked the camera again. Repeat as needed to do the whole tray.
We found that we could do about 400 slides in a couple of hours. While one of us would refill the carousel, the other would download the pictures from the camera to the computer. We figure it would have taken us a couple of weeks to do 400 slides with the scanner.
End result: was that we then had all the slides in a digital format on the computer, ready to make any adjustments we wanted in Photoshop. When we downloaded them to the computer, we used the built in camera wizard in Windows XP and could organize them into folders as well as the wizard naming the files for us. Irfanview can also do this.
This method may not work for everyone, but it certainly worked well for us. I can't stress enough the amount of time it saved us.
Disclaimer: I put this thread here with scanners, because so many people want to scan their slides, but if someone thinks this should be moved I sure understand.
Here's how we did it.
After buying the scanner, we found the entire task of scanning 2000+ old slides such a daunting task. We kept putting the project off because we knew how long it was going to take. One day *bright light* the lightbulb went on and we decided to try something that worked for us and hopefully works for you also.
We set up a slide projector - it was one of those carousel types. Then we set our digital camera on a tripod right beside the projector. For a screen we used a piece of poster board - okay maybe it wasn't called that, but I can't remember the name right now - but approximately 2ftx3ft. (We tried the regular slide screen we had with the sparklys on it. but it didn't work.) We felt that projecting the slides at a fairly small size gave better quality.
So then we just focused the camera and projector and clicked away. We set the camera to just go to the edges of the projected slide and nothing else. Clicked the camera, clicked the projector to advance one, clicked the camera again. Repeat as needed to do the whole tray.
We found that we could do about 400 slides in a couple of hours. While one of us would refill the carousel, the other would download the pictures from the camera to the computer. We figure it would have taken us a couple of weeks to do 400 slides with the scanner.
End result: was that we then had all the slides in a digital format on the computer, ready to make any adjustments we wanted in Photoshop. When we downloaded them to the computer, we used the built in camera wizard in Windows XP and could organize them into folders as well as the wizard naming the files for us. Irfanview can also do this.
This method may not work for everyone, but it certainly worked well for us. I can't stress enough the amount of time it saved us.