Shooting Slides with Digital

Perhaps this should be in the Beginner's forum, but I've lots of slides from my Nik II days (Aaah. Sweet memories...) a few of which I'd like to transfer to digital.

I purchased a cheap little Opteka digital duplicator, essentially an extension tube with slide mounts, but my results are all over the place, varying particularly with the light source. (I've tried a lighting table, natural sunlight (blue sky), cloudy sky, and WB adjusted indoor light .

Further, results vary with the dominant color of the shot, open water blue, close up red, etc. and if you think shooting sunballs is difficult with digital, try shooting slides of sunballs.

Color, contrast and even sharpness seem to vary the most. I've shot a couple slides several ways and then seeing which I can fix best via Photoshop, but that's very time consuming.

D

oes anybody have any knowledge of the most reliable light source, settings, etc. for this process.

Perhaps this should be in the Beginner's forum, but I've lots of slides from my Nik II days (Aaah. Sweet memories...) a few of which I'd like to transfer to digital.

I purchased a cheap little Opteka digital duplicator, essentially an extension tube with slide mounts, but my results are all over the place, varying particularly with the light source. (I've tried a lighting table, natural sunlight (blue sky), cloudy sky, and WB adjusted indoor light .

Further, results vary with the dominant color of the shot, open water blue, close up red, etc. and if you think shooting sunballs is difficult with digital, try shooting slides of sunballs.

Color, contrast and even sharpness seem to vary the most. I've shot a couple slides several ways and then seeing which I can fix best via Photoshop, but that's very time consuming.

D

oes anybody have any knowledge of the most reliable light source, settings, etc. for this process.

I don't think it exists hence the existence of slide scanners. If you have only a few, there are loads of folk willing to scan for you and you probably have a neighbor who has a scanner that will get you results as good as a 10MP photo will.

Bill

I have thousands of old UW slides, from 1995 on. Ive recently been going through them to archive some of my old favorites. I've been using a nikon coolscan 5000. Its very time consuming, but the results are good with some ps work. I find I have to do mainly color and saturation adjustments. The coolscan scans at 4000 dpi 16 bits at max. Ive blown up and printed some with great results. Check out flickr/photos/vazuw

I don't think it exists hence the existence of slide scanners. If you have only a few, there are loads of folk willing to scan for you and you probably have a neighbor who has a scanner that will get you results as good as a 10MP photo will.

Bill

Thanks, gentlemen, at least now I know where I stand.

I used to work at a pro photolab. We had a slide scanner and it did a decent job. Much faster than a "at home" scanner. It was really reasonable too! I think we charged .39 each? I dont know about you, but that is a lot better than sitting there and taking hrs up feeding slides in one at a time, or those bulk loaders that jam all the time.

Just google slide scanning, and you will get hundreds of options. Make a few calls and I am sure you will find some lab that does just what you are looking for.

I would HIGHLY recomend sending in a small sample of slides before you jump in and send off 1000's at once.