35mm Slide Scanning Service
Professional 35mm Slide Scanning with Dust & Scratch Removal
I offer professional 35mm slide scanning at a reasonable price. Your slides will be scanned on the same professional quality 4000 dpi dedicated film scanner which I use to scan my own slides for my stock photo database and for producing fine art gallery prints. Since I license digital images for publication and also must be able to print sharp, colorful images up to 30" x 45", I am very demanding of the quality of my scanning equipment and workflow and you can expect the same high standards when I scan your slides. You will find plenty of examples of scanned slides by exploring the photo galleries on my site.
Please use the form below to calculate the price of your scanning job (you must have Javascript enabled on your browser to use this form). When you are ready to place a scanning order, fill out the return mailing address form and click the 'Place Order' button. You will then be presented with an order confirmation page which you should print out and include with your slide shipment. For PayPal credit card orders I will email a separate PayPal payment request. Please read the notes and slide mailing preparation information below before sending your slides. I accept checks, money order (US Dollars only) and PayPal.com credit card payment.
Notes on Slide Scanning
What Film Formats Do You Scan?
Currently, I am scanning mounted 35mm color or black and white slides only. I may extend this service to include 35mm negatives in the future.
The Nikon Coolscan 5000 Slide Scanner
I use the latest generation Nikon Coolscan 5000 dedicated 35mm slide scanner with a 50-slide bulk loader. The Nikon 5000 is arguably the best scanner in its class and produces results rivaling $25 - $100 per slide drum scans.
Your Digital Files Delivered on CD or DVD
Your slides are scanned to uncompressed TIFF files and are burned onto CDs or DVDs along with a reduced-size JPEG version of each image sized to 720 pixels on the longest dimension. Portrait format images are rotated upright, though if the image subject doesn't make the correct orientation obvious, please mark the 'up' direction on the slide mount.
Virtually all image editing software can read and write TIFF files and the reduced size JPEG files are viewable with a web browser. JPEG images are even viewable on your TV with many recent DVD video players. I archive all of my own slide scans as TIFF files on DVD since it is important to me to preserve all of the image data in a standard, uncompressed format. The JPEG image format, while ubiquitous on the web, uses a file size compression method which throws away varying amounts of image data to achieve achieve smaller file sizes, something I am not willing to subject my archived images to.
You can choose either CDs or DVDs, but for large numbers of slides I suggest choosing to have them delivered on DVDs which can store up to 8 times the amount of data as a CD. I use name brand, archival quality media and I test read each CD or DVD after creation, but you should be aware that the lifetime of even the best quality disc media is finite. Though manufacturers quote data integrity lifetimes on the order of 50 years or more for CDs, for instance, recent published test data suggests that occasionally CDs and DVDs will fail and become unreadable much sooner, perhaps within even a few years of being burned. For this reason I make duplicate copies of all of my own images on CD or DVD and even keep the two copies in different locations (in case of fire, for instance). I suggest that you do the same, especially with your most important images, which is why I offer duplicate disc sets with your scanning order if you do not want to make your own copies from the discs I deliver to you.
Which Scan Resolution/Size Should I Request?
My advice for this is to consider the maximum size print you think you might want from any particular slide. For instance, if you only ever want to print small 5" x 7" prints, then scanning at 1678 dpi (dots or pixels per inch) will be sufficient for a sharp print. If you might want to make a print at 12" x 18" or larger, however, then scanning at the maximum 4000 dpi is necessary. In general, for prints up to about 16" x 20", one should scan film at a resolution which yields a final print size at 300 dpi. Virtually all of the detail of a 35mm slide can be captured by scanning at 4000 dpi and given a properly exposed slide taken on fine grained film with a sharp lens you can often get excellent prints up to 40" x 60" from a 4000 dpi scan. I scan all of my own slides at the maximum resolution of 4000 dpi since any particular image might need to be printed very large, but for many people this may be overkill. I would suggest that you have your best slides scanned at 4000 dpi and choose an appropriate scan resolution for everything else based on the largest size print you will want to make.
The following table summarizes the relationship among scanning dpi, maximum desired print size and the approximate number of uncompressed TIFF files which fit on a CD or DVD:
| Scan Resolution | Print Size | Pixel Dimensions | File Size (TIFF) | # Files / CD (8bit) | # Files / DVD (8bit) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1678 DPI | 5" x 7" | 1500 x 2100 | 9.1 MB | 71 | 571 |
| 2662 DPI | 8" x 10" | 2400 x 3000 | 20.6 MB | 31 | 252 |
| 4000 DPI | 12" x 18" | 3600 x 5400 | 56.5 MB | 11 | 92 |
Dust and Scratch Removal
Scratches, fingerprints and dust can ruin an otherwise fine film scan. I use compressed air blasts and an anti-static brush to clean film before loading into the scanner, but you can never get rid of every speck of dust and defects like scratches will show up as white or black dots and scars in a scanned image. Before the development of automatic dust and scratch removal in film scanners you had to spend enormous amounts of time removing image defects in Photoshop from even the most pristine of scans. Automatic dust and scratch removal can literally save you hours of cleanup work in an image editor, especially for 4000 dpi scans and less than sparkling-clean slides. Nikon's ICE4 technology effectively removes most dust and scratches from your slides with minimal impact on the rest of the image.
Note: Automatic ICE4 dust and scratch removal does not work with black and white slides. ICE4 will work on Ektachrome/Fujichrome and Kodachrome films, though the best results are obtained with Ektachrome/Fujichrome.
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| No Dust and Scratch Removal | Dust and Scratch Removal |
8-bits or 16-bits Per Channel?
All but the most high-end video cards and monitors display images with 8 bits per RGB color channel, or 16.7 million colors, representing all combinations of 256 shades of red, green and blue. Studies show that the human eye/brain cannot reliably distinguish among more than about 10 million colors, so 8 bits per channel image files seem more than sufficient to represent all the colors you can see in an image. Some people, particularly photographers like myself, still demand higher fidelity images. Since modern film scanners can output more than 8 bits per color channel when scanning slides, usually 12 to 14 bits per channel, storing images as standard 16-bit TIFF files will retain all the information a scanner is capable of extracting from a slide.
One might ask if 8-bit images can contain more colors than the human eye can even see, why might you want to scan to 16-bit files instead, considering a 16-bit version of an image file is twice as large as an 8-bit version. What 16-bit TIFF images give you, actually, is greater post-scan color, contrast and tone correction headroom when editing your images in a 16-bit capable image editor like Adobe Photoshop. This can allow you to brighten up underexposed slides or slides with deep, dark shadows, for instance, without getting posterization, a type of color banding in the dark tones of your image, often seen when performing the same edits on an 8-bit file. If your slides are properly exposed and you don't envision performing severe color correction editing with Photoshop, you can safely stick with 8-bit images.
Crop or No-Crop Option
Select Crop if you would like me to crop away the black slide mount border (and possibly the rounded mount window corners of older slides). You may lose a millimeter or so of image area in order to properly crop an image like this. Choose No-Crop to retain all of the image area including a thin black border caused by the opaque slide mount.
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| Scanned with Crop option | Scanned with No Crop option |
Color-managed Scanning Workflow
Every film scanner imparts its own characteristic color, contrast and tone shifts (errors, really) to the raw digital image and without color correction the digital image scans can look quite different than your original slides. Implementing a scanner and monitor color management workflow corrects for these scanner characteristics in order to match as best as possible the look of a scanned digital image to the original slide. I use a fully color-managed workflow when scanning and editing. This includes regularly calibrating my monitor with a ColorVision Monitor Spyder and Photocal software and color-profiling my slide scanner using a Kodak Q60/IT-8 calibration slide. Further color, contrast and tone editing, of course, can then be done using an image editor such as Adobe Photoshop.
Image Color Spaces
Using a color-managed workflow necessitates applying a color space to every image scanned. Entire books have been written about color management and image color spaces, so I won't be able to fully explain what they are to the uninitiated, but basically a color space defines how the RGB color channel numbers in an image file translate to real, viewable colors. By default, I deliver images in the sRGB color space which is the standard color space for web images.
Color spaces define the range of hues that an image can have and their are alternatives to sRGB which contain a wider range of hues. In fact, many color slide films, such as Fuji Velvia 50, can contain brighter and more saturated colors than can fit in the sRGB color space. For this reason, and because many photographers use saturated films like Velvia, it is often a good idea to save scanned images in a larger color space like Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, Ektaspace or Bruce RGB. I generally use Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB for my own slide scans. If you utilize a color-managed workflow and/or wish to have films like Velvia scanned, you may want choose one of the other color spaces above instead of sRGB.
Preparing Your Slides for Shipment
- Separate plastic and paper mounted slides. The bulk slide loader I use must be set one or the other type and plastic and paper mounted slides cannot be intermixed in the loader.
- Do not rotate your portrait format slides upright as you would when loading them into a slide projector. Please orient all of your slides the in same direction. If you can determine the emulsion side of your slides, please group your slides with the emulsion sides all facing the same direction. The emulsion side usually has a dull appearance compared to the opposite side. Also, most paper-mounted slides have "This side toward screen" printed on the emulsion side of the mount.
- To perform dust and scratch removal on Kodachrome slides, a special set of scanner options must be used. Please separate Kodachrome slides from Ektachrome/Fujichrome/Agfachrome/Whateverchrome slides.
- Separate color slides from black and white slides. Note: Dust and scratch removal does not work on black and white slides.
- Pack slides in boxes, slide pages or wrap a 2-inch strip of paper around groups of slides and place a rubber-band around the them. To prevent any possible moisture damage during shipping, I suggest you place your slides in one or more zip-loc bags. You may also ship slides in slide projector carousels.
- Pack all of your secured and bagged slides, your order form and check made out to Scott Robertson (if not paying my credit card via PayPal) into a box with plenty of padding and ship to:
Scott Robertson
IMTC/TSRB Room 314
85 5th Street NW
Atlanta, GA 30308
404-226-2082 - I will contact you when your materials have arrived for scanning and when your scanning job is completed.