This stack represents about 2/3 of the slides that I have gone through in the last several days. In addition to this was a box containing another thousand or so loose slides. Fortunately, the majority of the slides went straight into the garbage. What remains are slides I definitely want to scan and some that I might want to scan. I kept most slides with familiar faces in them and trashed the scenic shots.

Now that I have “only” a couple thousand scanning candidates, the real work begins. Slides are loaded into a mounted film holder – usually three or four at a time. A preview scan is made. This gives me some idea how much tweaking I’ll need to do. If I’m lucky, the slide will be in good shape and will not have faded too much. If the slide is an E-6 process film like Ektachrome or Fujichrome, I have the option of using digital ICE to greatly reduce the amount of dust-spotting I will have to do later. (ICE does not work on Kodachrome slides or black and white negatives.) If the slide has faded over the years, Nikon’s digital ROC can be utilized to restore much of the slide’s original color. After making these adjustments, it”s time to do another preview scan. When things are looking good, I scan at the scanner’s highest resolution and bit depth. This produces a file approximately 120 megabytes in size, but gives me the most latitude for the work I’ll do next.

So far, all of the steps have been performed “in the background”. By that I mean while doing other things like working on this blog entry, responding to a ton of fan e-mail or even working on previously scanned images in PhotoShop. It’s a good thing that it’s possible to do this, or I’d never get anything else done. Scanning a single image this way can take up to 30 minutes. I’d rather not spend the next 2,000 hours on this project.

Finally, I open the scanned images in PhotoShop and use it’s power to do the final tweaks. Usually this involves a visit to the Levels, Color Balance, and Hue controls. There is almost always some dust-spotting needed. Finally, the image is sharpened and sized for e-mailing. I have a PhotoShop Action for this, since pretty much the same steps get applied to all of my images.

Of course, I am painfully aware that the “best” way to maintain image fidelity would be to remove the slides from their holders, wet-mount them and have them drum scanned. I have had a few transparencies scanned this way by fellow SPAM’er, Kurt Krause, and these are the best-looking scans in my collection. Several of my Bali images including my “Bali Boys” shot was scanned in this way. But at $75.00 a pop, I’d have to take out a second mortgage on the loft.