Digitising Old Slides (part 1)
24th April 2021
This month I have been spending time scanning and renovating some of my parent's slides. Which involves spending quite a bit of time here at my desk:
I have box upon box of colour slides taken from the 1960s onwards. These include family shots and also some documentary work by my Dad who spent a lot of time photographing the building of Liverpool Cathedral.
The process is quite labour intensive but also quite rewarding once a photo is restored to an acceptable standard and catalogued on my iMac and an external hard drive.
I have found the first step of sorting and throwing out unwanted slides to be the most difficult because it is so easy to become very emotionally attached to some of these old images. But they can't all be kept and there's more than one reason for that. Some of them are utter rubbish!!! Pure black with nothing to be recovered! Why on earth did they keep them? Some of them are totally unidentifiable because very few have been marked to say where they are or who they are.
I view the slides on a light box with a loupe and a bin to my side. If I have no idea of what or who the subject is the slide is ditched. The choice may also be down to the condition of the slide. For example, slides can grow mould on them over time, depending on how they have been stored. This shows well in this slide before I have tried to do any restoration:
Here are some slides loaded to the frame ready to go to the scanner:
And here they are loaded into my scanner:
Next month, in part two of this blog, I shall be looking at the images in both Lightroom and Photoshop prior to filing them on my hard drive. The photos in my office were taken with my Leica V-Lux 114 and the slide was with a Kodak Instamatic on Kodakchrome.
I have box upon box of colour slides taken from the 1960s onwards. These include family shots and also some documentary work by my Dad who spent a lot of time photographing the building of Liverpool Cathedral.
The process is quite labour intensive but also quite rewarding once a photo is restored to an acceptable standard and catalogued on my iMac and an external hard drive.
I have found the first step of sorting and throwing out unwanted slides to be the most difficult because it is so easy to become very emotionally attached to some of these old images. But they can't all be kept and there's more than one reason for that. Some of them are utter rubbish!!! Pure black with nothing to be recovered! Why on earth did they keep them? Some of them are totally unidentifiable because very few have been marked to say where they are or who they are.
I view the slides on a light box with a loupe and a bin to my side. If I have no idea of what or who the subject is the slide is ditched. The choice may also be down to the condition of the slide. For example, slides can grow mould on them over time, depending on how they have been stored. This shows well in this slide before I have tried to do any restoration:
Here are some slides loaded to the frame ready to go to the scanner:
And here they are loaded into my scanner:
Next month, in part two of this blog, I shall be looking at the images in both Lightroom and Photoshop prior to filing them on my hard drive. The photos in my office were taken with my Leica V-Lux 114 and the slide was with a Kodak Instamatic on Kodakchrome.