Slides—From Past to Present
By Angie Felix

As you thumb through those boxes of old memorabilia, you come across multiple treasurers from the past—old concert and movie tickets, yearbooks, and lo and behold—a slew of 35mm slides. You vaguely recall how the family photos and a few vacations were captured on slide film years ago and how your family would gather together on holidays and occasions, reminiscing and watching them on an old slide projector.

Then you think about how times have changed and no longer do you even have to take your pictures to the photo lab, let alone load them into a projector to view them. In fact, you wonder what good these slides are to you now—can you even use them in today’s technology driven age?

The answer is YES—this high-tech world has thankfully granted us ways to reach back into the past, and pull history into the present. Using a scanner, you can easily turn those old slides into digital images, ready to share through email or print and use in your scrapbooks. You’ll also have a back-up in case anything happens to the original slides.

Scanners
There are a couple of different kinds of scanners you might use for converting slides to digital format. These scanners vary in the quality they’ll provide.

A flatbed scanner is likely what most of you have at home. In order to scan slides on this device, you’ll need a special attachment or adapter that often comes with your scanner. Most adapters are simple plates that will distribute the light from the scanner more evenly over transparencies such as slides while others are hoods that have built-in light supplies.

Film scanners tend to be better suited for scanning slides or negatives (and provide better quality), while flatbed scanners are made to scan many different types of media, but are not optimized to handle any one type in particular. Film scanners are designed to provide the amount and type of light needed to illuminate transparent images such as slides.

Steps to scanning
As with scanning anything, it’s always best to know what you want the end result to be. Before you scan, think about how you want to use the images after they’re in digital format. This will help you to determine the dpi (or resolution) you should scan the slides at. The higher the resolution, the higher quality the image file you’ll have created, and the more space it will take up.

While you don’t want to create images files that are huge in comparison to the size you will ever use, you also don’t want to create files so small that they can’t live up to your expectations later. If you intend to only email the photos and view them on a monitor, a low resolution such as 72 dpi or 100 dpi is sufficient. If you’re planning on printing them, you should consider higher resolutions like 300 to 400 dpi or 600 dpi for really large prints.

As you’re getting ready to scan the slides, be sure to clean them off and check that they are straight in their mounts. It’s easier to take off smudges, particles, etc. before you scan than it is to fix the problem once it is part of the image. If you’re using a flatbed, you should also clean the glass of the scanner before you begin.

Load the slide into the scanner and open your scanning software. Use the software to preview the image, then adjust the settings—select slide, positive film, positive transparency or Kodachrome (whichever your software offers) to indicate that slides are the type of media you are scanning, and select the resolution you’d like to scan at. Crop the image to the desired dimensions using the crop tool, then tell the software to scan. Make sure you are satisfied with the results, but remember that you can fine-tune the image later if needed.

If you are happy with the image, you should save it in an uncompressed file type such as a TIFF. TIFFs are perfect for saving original scans because they preserve the maximum data possible, while file formats like JPEGs or GIFs are compressed and condense some of the data in their effort to create a smaller file. Be sure to save two copies of the image—one to keep as an original, and another you can edit as desired.

With your slides scanned and saved on your PC or a CD, you’re ready to share them with the world—through email, the web or on your scrapbook pages.