Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Her Last Smile

No full-sized picture of this one.

Well Margot's bottom two teeth are very loose. So loose in fact, that she will likely have the bottom-left tooth out before the end of the night. This may be her last full baby-tooth smile.

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A question came up the other day from my friend Chris. He is tasked with converting a lot of old family slides to digital files. He is looking for advice, so please post it here. He is interested particularly in any advice anyone might have on any equipment people think would be a minimum requirement, like a larger monitor, special color calibrators for monitors, DVD burner, etc. Obviously any other wisdom from experience would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

4 comments:

Holly said...

Scanning slides... Scanning slides is a slow and tedious process. Very slow and very tedious. At least with my scanner. I actually really hate to scan slides. I use a Canoscan FS4000- it's a few years old and I'm sure there are newer and better models out there. I have a CD burner and just a plain old monitor and I haven't done any color calibration or anything. When I scan my slides they are invariably too dark (I think it is just my scanner and software), so I pull all the data into Photoshop and use that to adjust different levels. I don’t really do anything too fancy, but it works well for me. My ex scanned all his family slides as well and he did it using a film scanner and a laptop and autolevels and they turned out pretty decent. I don’t know which scanner he used or I’d send it your way. Hope this helps somewhat.

Anonymous said...

Holly - thanks for the comments. I agree that scanning slides is a very slow process I'm using a Nikon Coolscan V ED and the software that comes with it has some great editing and touchup features.

Sounds like you don't worry too much about color calibration. Has this ever been a problem for you when showing pictures on different computers, or having them printed?

Thanks again for the feedback. I'll let Matt know how my scanning turns out.

Holly said...

Not really. I try to stay as close to the original slide as I can. I have found though, that I need to make them a tad bit lighter than I think they should appear. That helps them print better and show up better on the web or various monitors. If you are really worried about it you could always save 2 files- the original scan (so all the data is there) and the reworked file. In my limited experience, I hadn't met anyone that done any color calibrating of their monitor or anything and they had seom really beautiful prints. Do you shoot digital at all? I have heard of some people doing that so if you will be working a lot of images for it then it might be worth it to go ahead and go through the effort.

Anonymous said...

Most of what I shoot now days is digital. As a matter of fact, I have the same D-SLR that Matt does.

That being said, I shot two rolls of Velvia ASA 100 slide film on a recent trip to Glacier NP. I used to think digital was the cat's meow, but now I'm not so sure after seeing these slides. There still alot to be said for film.

On the other hand, in terms of convenience and flexibility, digital can't be beat. I don't see myself switching back anytime soon.

Sort of a long-winded answer to your question, but, as Matt mentioned in his original post, the reason I'm worried about scanning in the first place is that I may be asked to scan my grandfather's slide collection. We're talking something on the order of 5000 to 10,000 images. Before starting, I just want to make sure I don't miss something obvious, change my mind at slide number 2943, and then have to go back and do them over again.

Thanks for the comments on image brightness. It's something I've run into when having digital images printed for me by Ofoto. What looked great on my monitor came back too dark.