RAILTIME MEDIA Railway Videos
This is the reason the author is batch scanning his slides — each notebook holds about 25 Kodak boxes of slides; each rack has fi ve shelves. There is another rack of shelves on the opposite side of the room (plus unsorted slides in Logan boxes, in original Kodak boxes, and otherwise scattered around). STEVE BARRY PHOTO
megabyte size is easy to work with and you can store a ton of them on an external hard drive. There are very few situations where you will ever need a file with 16-bit color depth, so just go with the smaller file size.
Basic Scanner Settings Since scanning software varies, we’ll
touch on only a few basics that I use. First, I usually turn off all the automatic settings — automatic color, automatic white balance, anything automatic. I’ll take care of that stuff in Lightroom. The only automatic thing I leave on is automatic cropping; most scanning software does a decent job of detecting where the edge of the image is (although night shots can sometimes present a problem). Next, you’ll likely see a setting for the
number of passes the scanner makes to scan each image. Every time the scanner scans an image, it verifies each pixel is right. The trade-off is it takes twice as long to make two passes over an image as opposed to once, and three times longer for three passes. Never have the scanner only make one pass; I find that two passes is the best compromise between getting it right and time. Locate Digital ICE (or the equivalent) and
turn it on — this will save you hours of work later on. Also, unless you really feel you need it, set your color depth to eight bits instead of 16 bits. And save your files as TIF. Don’t save as JPEG, since this will really limit what you can do with the image in Lightroom or Photoshop.
Selecting Slides for Scanning Obviously, one way of scanning slides is
to pull your best ones and scan only those. But in my case, my slides are all filed in slide pages (which are then placed in binders), filed chronologically with each box of slides (as they came back from the processor), taking up two slide pages. I could go through every
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slide page and, using a loupe, select the best from each sequence and scan only that. But I have found that it’s actually faster just to pull all the slides out of the slide pages and put them into the batch loader — the Nikon SF- 210 can handle a box-and-a-half (three slide pages) at a time — scan them all and then pick the best to process in Lightroom. You can then either delete the ones you didn’t process or (like me) save ’em all. Storage on external drives is cheap enough these days. Every slide that is scanned gets a green
Sharpie dot in the upper right corner on the mount. If a stray slide is found, the green dot (or lack thereof) makes it easy to quickly identify if the slide has already been scanned or not. My notebook filing system also means every slide has a home, so those stray slides can go back right where they belong. With the green dots, it’s easy to flip through the notebooks to see which pages still need scanning.
Scan Away! After you have performed a few dozen
batches of scans, you will start to feel comfortable with the process. As you digitize more of your collection, you’ll find a renewed interest in your images, both for yourself and those you choose to share them with. This is a great way to bring back some lost enthusiasm for the hobby as we grow older. What’s more, it never hurts to have a digital backup for your irreplaceable images. We never expect calamity, but many valuable collections have been lost to flood or fire over the years. Even if the originals are destroyed, digital files will last far into the future. This is only a very basic introduction to scanning. Since software varies so much, it is difficult to get into a step-by-step description of the process. Find the software you like, learn how to use it, and get a few scans done. Soon you’ll be putting a stack of slides into the scanner every night before you go to bed and have a bunch of new scans to play with in the morning (and you’ll never get anything else done).
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WhiteRiverProductions.com 57
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