Scanners: scanning slides

[luke9511]

Hello everyone I hope your all well, I just bought a Epson Perfection v600 scanner and am wanting to scan my grandparents picture slides and archive them on dvd, but was wondering what settings I should use or software I should use to scan them and touch them up if need be. Thank you for your time!

[Tony W]

Hi luke9511, welcome to RetouchPro.

First thing I would suggest is to have a good play and try out various settings for yourself using the supplied Epson software.

The Epson software is very good and it is unlikely that you will require anything other than this (for the initial scan) although there are others that you may want to look at in the future such as Vuescan and Silverfast.

The settings you will use will vary depending on image content etc. It is possible to get good images just using the Epson Auto settings. Usually however it is better to set up the scanning manually and turn all auto off such as sharpening etc as you can apply these with more control in your editing application.

I would suggest that when you set the scanning resolution there is no point in going above 3200 ppi as you will only be increasing the pixel count and not actually resolving any more detail from the original. Once you have scanned the image optimise the scan using the histogram and save the file as Tiff not Jpeg. Although a larger file than jpeg Tiff will not loose anything when saved again after editing.

Finally if you do not already have it you will need software for editing your images.

[plugsnpixels]

Tony gives good advice, especially regarding resolution (you want it high but not uselessly high, especially so you don't end up with teeny wallet-size photos such as those people tend to post on Facebook). But he meant "lose", not "loose" ;-).

Be sure to keep the original TIFF scans after resaving as JPEG (assuming you do this to maximize space on the DVD) so you can return to the originals if need be.

I use VueScan with old Nikon film scanners, and Epson's own software with an older Epson 1600 transparency flatbed (you can select multiple areas of the preview to scan as a batch, which is nice).

PS: You can also make a DVD slideshow of the images that is playable on a TV (for the older generations...).