Stepping in a slide zone
It seems like I get new toys in sporadic bursts; tonight I’m messing with the latest one, a slide/35mm film scanner. This may seem like an odd thing to have for someone who doesn’t even own a film camera (he said as his photographer grandfather spins in his grave), but I’ve wanted one of these for ages for an entirely different reason. I have quite a slide collection. Many moons ago, I was very much into slides of photos from various and sundry NASA missions, and amassed quite a collection. In later years, I routinely salvaged promotional photo slides that were due to be thrown away at the places where I worked. These would usually be the very familiar publicity photos, logos, etc. (you see, everyone else got the same slides sent to them too), in 35mm color slide form. Some years back my slide projector broke, so I’ve had a ton of slides and nothing that I could really do with them.
Now, as with so many other things in my life, they can be digitally archived. The scanner itself is a pint-sized cousin of my flatbed scanner, and makes roughly the same disagreeable grinding noises. The scanner software itself is a hoot, obviously a product of a tech writer or translator for whom English isn’t even high enough on the food chain to be a second language; maybe fourth or fifth. When my first scans were X-ray negatives, I figured out that I needed to switch to “generic color” mode instead of “nagetive” (yes, that’s really how the software spells it). The result of a good scan is a rather large TIFF file, and I usually need to do some color and contrast balancing in Paint Shop Pro. But the images turn out nicely. (I’ve already turned a couple of my early slide-scanning experiments into images on the front page of the site; see if you can spot them.) … Read more
