Vintage 35mm digitalized images

[Old school]

Dear Alamy Contributors,

My wife and I are 'old school' photographers with 35,000 or so 35mm color slides using Nikon equipment and lens.  Most are Kodachrome 25 and 64.  We digitalized 1000s with the end result we have images with 150 to 250 megabits...too large to send by email.  Have any other ALAMY CONTRIBUTORS asked about submitting images in such large megabits and if so, what happened?  Also, there is an inherent loss of image fidelity between the original 35mm Kodachrome 25 and the digitalized results.  Any Contributors asked these questions? cheers, Flo and Paul

[MDM]

30 minutes ago, Old school said:

 

Back to our original question…have any ALAMY contributors been successful in ‘digitizing’ their slides and if so, may we ask what the magic was you used simple enough for 'old school' photographers to master and won't cost a fortune?  We have perhaps 35,000 slides that are sitting in huge 1500 slide storage boxes and most of the 35K slides have been digitized by the 5000.  We are hopeful someone has mastered this photography challenge to benefit use of vintage slides for "old school' photographers.

Cheers, Flo and Paul

 

 

 

I strongly recommend copying the slides using your D810 and the Nikon ES-1 Slide Copier and a micro-Nikkor lens. If you happen to have the 55mm micro-Nikkor in your lens collection, then you will need an extension ring as well to bring it up to lifesize. Or you can use the 60mm micro - Nikkor. I use a daylight LED as backlight. 

 

Having used a very decent slide scanner (Nikon LS4000) and the above setup I can say without any doubt that the copying method above is far superior after a bit of tweaking. It is also far faster.

 

The trick is to shoot raw, use a bit of noise reduction balanced with appropriate sharpening in Lightroom or ACR and then finally downsize the resulting image to 3000x2000 pixels. Way better than scanning unless you pay for drum scans.

 

 

Edited October 28, 2019 by MDM

[Colin Woods]

3 minutes ago, MDM said:

I strongly recommend copying the slides using your D810 and the Nikon ES-1 Slide Copier and a micro-Nikkor lens. If you happen to have the 55mm micro-Nikkor in your lens collection, then you will need an extension ring as well to bring it up to lifesize. Or you can use the 60mm micro - Nikkor.

Yup. Exactly what I did. A batch of 120 went through QC just last week. But to the OP, you could post one of your scans here for the folks here on the forum to look at. There are a lot of very experienced and very helpful people here and you will soon have a consensus of opinion on the sharpness or otherwise of your scanned slides. When you say that the scans lacked the crispness of the slide, do keep in mind that when you are looking at a slide it is not magnified to the same extent as looking at a file on a screen. When you look at a file on screen at 100% its like looking at a ten foot long (I am guessing at this size, but you would have to print big) print from your slide. Even my sharpest slides look a bit soft when photographed (as MDM says above) but with a bit of sharpening they look fine. 

 

39 minutes ago, Old school said:

our computer skills and uses of various photography ‘software’ programs isn’t in the cards

If you have a valuable archive of 35k slides, its probably worth gritting your collective teeth and getting to grips with Photohsop. The basics are not that onerous and there are a billion videos on youtube to guide you. And the awesome forum here of course.

[Harry Harrison]

10 hours ago, Old school said:

We digitalized 1000s with the end result we have images with 150 to 250 megabits

You've certainly been busy on the scanning front! These are very large files for 35mm originals, even for Kodachrome, are you referring to their 16-bit Tiff file size?  Perhaps an easier way to understand their size is from their pixel dimensions? Are they all retouched for dust etc., are they captioned and keyworded or will you need to do that? Alamy only accept jpegs in any case but it might be better to consider downsizing their dimensions for Alamy.

 

Alamy Quality Control (QC) is very strict in terms of quality and so if uploading in the normal way your scans would have to compare favourably with digital images. However there is another route, Reportage/Archival, that doesn't have the same QC requirements but are then displayed with the rider that "This image could have imperfections as it’s either historical or reportage."

 

Edit:

Sorry, my comments assumed that you were talking about 150 to 250 MegaBytes not megabits. Approximate pixel dimensions are always the clearest way to depict image size, saves confusion with megabits/megabytes, compressed/uncompressed, jpeg/tiff etc.

Edited October 28, 2019 by Harry Harrison
Reportage/Archival

[spacecadet]

You'll need to apply for the archival route, and it's intended for images which are of some historical interest. My criterion is whether the scene looks really different today- different vehicles and fashions, buildings demolished and so on.

[sb photos]

9 hours ago, Old school said:

We digitalized 1000s with the end result we have images with 150 to 250 megabits...too large to send by email.

 

For clarification, is the file size range as you quoted megabits, or megabytes? If megabits, 150 megabits equals 18.75 megabytes, and if megabytes your files are likely Tiff, which would require saving or exporting as 8 bit jpegs. As already mentioned above, you will likely need to apply for archival upload rights depending upon the slides content and age. Also, are you using a dedicated optical slide scanner or a flat bed scanner?  If a flat bed scanner it's often hard to get sharp scans from 35mm.

Edited October 28, 2019 by sb photos

[Harry Harrison]

5 minutes ago, sb photos said:

megabits, or megabytes

Yes, my mistake, assumed they must be referring to Megabytes.

[MDM]

10 hours ago, Old school said:

Dear Alamy Contributors,

Most are Kodachrome 25 and 64.  We digitalized 1000s with the end result we have images with 150 to 250 megabits...too large to send by email.  Have any other ALAMY CONTRIBUTORS asked about submitting images in such large megabits and if so, what happened?  Also, there is an inherent loss of image fidelity between the original 35mm Kodachrome 25 and the digitalized results.  

 

How did you digitise your images? High quality digitisation of slides is a skilled task and needs appropriate equipment. There is definitely an inherent loss of fidelity in the process as you say but the degree of loss depends on the equipment used and the skill of the person doing the digitising. Skilled post processing on a computer is essential to get best results as is getting a good quality initial digital copy. 

 

 

 

[DDoug]

When I joined in March of 2014, the initial test upload required four images. Of mine, three passed and one, a 35mm Velvia slide shot on a tripod with a Canon L lens and digitized on a Canon FS4000US slide scanner, failed. Since then, I've only uploaded scanned 35mm as archival and only then when the same shot could not be duplicated today with digital capture.

 

The minimum digital capture at the time was eight megapixels and today it's six. I haven't tested the water yet to see if that change would make the difference between acceptable and not.

[Chuck Nacke]

Interesting subject, but I don't call it "digitalizing"  I say scanning.

 

While I have been using F mount (Nikon) equipment for the last 20 years, the only film scanners

I have owned and worked with were Canon, FS2710 and for the last ten years two FS4000's.

With the 4000's, scanning a 35mm chromes at 4000DPI I get a full frame image at over 5700 X

at about 130MBs, in 16bit.  I do not use any digital retouching during the RAW scan, but do use

Bicubic Sharpener in Photoshop (PS) to slightly downsize the finished image before dropping

it to 8bit color and saving it as a 300DPI JPEG, the finished JPEG is always over 5,000 by at

300DPI in aRGB color space.

 

Last week I got out one my CanoScan FS4000US's and could not make my old Windows XP machine which

had a PCMCIA slot working so I had to buy View Scan Professional software, $99.99 US, and run the 4000 using

a USB connection.  I had written before that I always used the 4000 with an Adaptec 16bit PCMCIA card.

To my surprise the 4000 ran perfectly in View Scan using a USB connection and I am back scanning old

35mm chromes, mostly FUJI RDP.  I do still use PEC-12 to clean chromes.  I do not scan mounted slides, I

always remove them from the mount.

 

I would guess that currently about 50% of the images that I have on Alamy are scans from RDP or Kodachrome

64 or 200 slides.  I will also add that during my 16 years of contributing to Alamy I have had one QC fail because

I burned to wrong size to the disk, back in the "Good Old Days" of mailing a CD to London.  I also spent some time

going back through the licenses I've had with Alamy and found that over 50% have been images scanned from slides.

Luckily my agents and the magazines I worked for kept my film caption envelopes with the slides, but I do spend a lot

of time researching caption information on the web and trying to find current news to include in the caption (IPTC)

information.

 

Lastly,  Over the weekend I scanned two chromes, RDP, and was able to finish them in hours, not days like it took me

ten years ago using CanoScan software and PS 3.  I do run the RAW scans through Lightroom (LR) for color and cropping

and then dust spot in the current PS, I am running Creative Cloud on a Windows 10 machine and it is much faster finishing

scans now.  I do know that a lot claim to get good results photographing 35mm slides with a modern DSLR?  I bought an

old bowens Illumitran, but my D800's would not fit on it and I could not make the Nikon duplicating attachment work to the

quality that I get from the 4000 film scanner.

 

This winter I am planning to launch into scanning a large story that I did in the early 80's where I shot on Tri-X, Not sure how

that will go?

 

Flow and Paul,  What scanner are you using?

 

Chuck

[Old school]

Thank you all for replying to our question about submitting digitized/scanned Kodachrome 25, 64 and Ektachrome 100 slides to ALAMY.  Reading your own experiences and methods will take some time for us "old school' folks to understand.  A little history about our photography…we write short-stories about our world travels (we are both retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonels) using our own photography by sending plastic sheet panels of our slides to match the story location circa early 1970s.  This method worked for us for 2-decades.  The advent of digital photography was our ‘Old School’ down-fall.  When we searched for a machine to digitize slides several years ago, the best slide digitizing machine on the market was by NIKON; but it was $8,000.00 and simply too expensive.  We did buy the next best machine that would hold 50-slides and automatically feed and digitalize each slide.  PACIFIC IMAGE ELECTRONICS POWER SLIDE 5000 MAGIC TOUCH @ $1,200.00.  We optimized the 5000’s setting for TIF by ‘turning-on’ all the whistles and bells offered ie. dust removal even though we used a ‘brush’ to ‘dust’ each slide in advance, in order to maximize the best digitized slide image knowing there would be inherent loss of fidelity from a Kodachrome 25 and 64 slide;

1. Scanning resolution:5000dpi

2. Color depth (by RGB channel): 16-bit

3. Color mode: 48-bit

4. File size TIFF (no compression): 52MB

 

Our end results were digitized images that were on the order of 6591 x 3950 = 192 MB.  And those images when viewed at 100% were ‘soft’…lacking the ‘crisp’ fidelity of the original Kodachrome 25/64 slide.

 

Back to our original question…have any ALAMY contributors been successful in ‘digitizing’ their slides and if so, may we ask what the magic was you used simple enough for 'old school' photographers to master and won't cost a fortune?  We have perhaps 35,000 slides that are sitting in huge 1500 slide storage boxes and most of the 35K slides have been digitized by the 5000.  We are hopeful someone has mastered this photography challenge to benefit use of vintage slides for "old school' photographers.

Cheers, Flo and Paul

 

P.S. 1. We are senior citizens and our computer skills and uses of various photography ‘software’ programs isn’t in the cards…our computer outwits us on a regular bases as it is!

2. We now have a NIKON D810 and can use our old NIKON lens just fine.

 

[DDoug]

One thing I have no personal experience with yet, but plan to make a rainy-day project of this winter, is digital slide copying using a wet-mount process.

The comparisons of dry vs. wet scanning are impressive: https://wetmounting.com/Pages/SampleScans/halvorson.html

Welcome to the forum,

Don

[Marianne]

Take a class on Photoshop at your local community college. I did shortly before I turned 50,  with rudimentary computer skills (in my prior life as a lawyer my secretary took care of all the formatting, etc. for me, I could barely use Word.) 12 years later as a fellow senior citizen, I realize I don't learn as quickly as I did at 49, but I remember at the time fearing I'd be too old to learn - In fact, I went on to work as a digital tech for an "old School" photographer several years my junior. 

 

The point is, while Photoshop seems daunting and there is always more to learn, it is quite astonishing how quickly those of us who grew up in the analog world can become proficient. Even if you are going to submit work taken with your D810, you will need to learn Photoshop. 

 

Your files are not too large. Once they are exported as 8bit jpegs, they will continue to have the same pixel dimensions, but the inherent compression, even at level 12, the highest quality, will leave them at around 5-12MB (depending upon the complexity of the data in the file - e.g. a sunset that is mostly orange or a black and white image will often end up quite a bit smaller than a highly detailed landscape). The 17MB size that Alamy requires is for an uncompressed 8-bit Tiff, which translates to roughly a 6 megapixel image. As I explain below, you are in good shape there, and have some leeway.

 

In any event, the real issue here is the softness.

 

In order to correct for that, while re-"digitizing" by photographing may give better results, if you've done so much scanning already, you may be better off using some small bit of sharpening in Photoshop, and then downsizing a bit as this will also make the file sharper. As noted, you only need the file to be 6MP (megapixels) which is about 2000 x 3000 pixels (you'll want to make it just slightly larger than that to be safe , maybe 3025 on the long side) but in any case, if they are currently 5000 pixels on the long side, you can shrink them a lot. And downsizing to 4000 px on the kong side might easily do the trick. When you understand Photoshop, you'll be able to gauge how small you need the file to be to get it sharp. 

 

Also quite important, while you need to upload jpegs to Alamy, only export them as jpegs at the very last stage. You want to dust spot, sharpen, etc, as Tiffs since working on a jpeg degrades the file because you are using lossy compression. Tiffs can be compressed using ZIP or LZW without any loss of quality. 

 

Search the forum for "file size" to help you better understand what it means. 

 

You also probably want to look through the various pictures sold threads to get a sense of  what sells here. Generally, travel snapshots aren't worth uploading, but the types of photos that you have probably sold in the past with your articles are. Edit your collection and only upload the best. This will save you time, and more important, will insure you have a good collection of images without a lot of work that can bring your Alamy rank down. (Search "Alamy rank" on the forum.

 

A friend lent me a Nikon negative scanner and scanning some of my old work has long been on my bucket list. Most of my archive, going back to the 1970's, are negatives, not transparencies, much shot while I was taking black and white darkroom classes, so photographing them isn't an option. They are far less sharp than what I am used to with digital capture, which is why the archival route can be helpful. I don't know that buyers worry about the language that archival photos might have defects. Before Alamy had live news, I used to upload all my freshly shot editorial images, which would have passed QC, via the reportage route in order to get them online right away. Many of them have been licensed years later, not as breaking news, so I don't think the buyers worry about the archival/reportage caveat 

 

Good luck and welcome to Alamy! 

Edited October 28, 2019 by Marianne

[spacecadet]

1 hour ago, Colin Woods said:

 When you say that the scans lacked the crispness of the slide, do keep in mind that when you are looking at a slide it is not magnified to the same extent as looking at a file on a screen. When you look at a file on screen at 100% its like looking at a ten foot long (I am guessing at this size, but you would have to print big) print from your slide. Even my sharpest slides look a bit soft when photographed (as MDM says above) but with a bit of sharpening they look fine. 

 

+1 to this. Scanning (or in my case copying) is ruthless. it's sobering to find out how bad one's technique was 30 years ago.. Even my 5500px long side copies are something like 70" wide at 100%- whoever made a print anywhere near that size? Even home projector screens were usually only 40" high.

[John Mitchell]

When I started submitting to Alamy back in 2007, I spent almost two years scanning my 35mm slides for Alamy. I used a Nikon 4000 ED Super Coolscan scanner, which did a very good job. At the time, I didn't have a single QC failure. However, I was very selective about which slides I scanned, and I grudgingly rejected most of my collection. It's amazing how fuzzy some of those old scanned images look when viewed at 100%. The whole scanning process was very laborious but well worth the effort as my old images continue to license. In fact, quite a few have been zoomed this month. These days, when I submit scans, I do it through the archival route, which someone mentioned above. That option didn't exist ten years ago. It's the best way to go.

 

 

 

 

Edited October 28, 2019 by John Mitchell

[MDM]

52 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

Even my 5500px long side copies are something like 70" wide at 100%- whoever made a print anywhere near that size? Even home projector screens were usually only 40" high.

 

 Just correcting that statement. That print size would only be the case if the image was at around 70ppi. For high quality printing you would need a minimum of around 240 ppi (maybe 200 at a push) so the maximum print size would be about 27" (at 200 ppi). If you made a print from a 5500 pixel long side image at 70ppi, then it would be over 70" but would look horribly unsharp. 

[MDM]

1 hour ago, Marianne said:

T

 

In any event, the real issue here is the softness.

 

In order to correct for that, while re-"digitizing" by photographing may give better results, if you've done so much scanning already, you may be better off using some small bit of sharpening in Photoshop, and then downsizing a bit as this will also make the file sharper. As noted, you only need the file to be 6MP (megapixels) which is about 2000 x 3000 pixels (you'll want to make it just slightly larger than that to be safe , maybe 3025 on the long side) but in any case, if they are currently 5000 pixels on the long side, you can shrink them a lot. And downsizing to 4000 px on the kong side might easily do the trick. When you understand Photoshop, you'll be able to gauge how small you need the file to be to get it sharp. 

 

 

 

It would be interesting to see a few scans if the OP was to upload them to Dropbox or the like as 8bit full size JPEGs. High quality film scanners are not being made any more at any sensible price so the scanner may not be up to the job in which case they may not be able to do a lot with them even sharpening and downsizing. Noise is a major problem with film scans and this is far better dealt with in post on a raw D810 image in my experience - the dynamic range and general image quality are astounding from these Nikon cameras and these copying adapters make it very easy with the right lens.

 

Of course there is always the archival route for the existing scans as there is no QC but I have no doubt that a copy using a D810 and well-processed including downsizing would have no problem passing QC whereas the scans from my Nikon LS4000 (recently deceased) would be very unlikely to pass nowadays. 

[spacecadet]

18 minutes ago, MDM said:

 

 Just correcting that statement. That print size would only be the case if the image was at around 70ppi. For high quality printing you would need a minimum of around 240 ppi (maybe 200 at a push) so the maximum print size would be about 27" (at 200 ppi). If you made a print from a 5500 pixel long side image at 70ppi, then it would be over 70" but would look horribly unsharp. 

I was not referring to prints. I was referring to the image size at 100% on my monitor.

[MDM]

21 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

I was not referring to prints. I was referring to the image size at 100% on my monitor.

 You did say " Even my 5500px long side copies are something like 70" wide at 100%- whoever made a print anywhere near that size?" I took that to mean that you were saying that a 5500 pixel long side image was somehow so massive that nobody would ever need images that size for printing when in fact they are not that big at all. A 5500 pixel long side image would only print at 18.3" at 300 ppi which is the standard for professional photo lab printing. 

 

 

Edited October 28, 2019 by MDM

[spacecadet]

deleted. not worth it.

Edited October 28, 2019 by spacecadet

[Harry Harrison]

5 hours ago, Old school said:

Our end results were digitized images that were on the order of 6591 x 3950 = 192 MB

 

Thanks, so you did mean Megabytes, but 16-bit, it should actually be a 166MB file in 16-bit, 83MB in 8-bit by my reckoning. I think the advice above is correct in that you will need to downsize considerably before uploading but it's difficult to judge how soft your scans are without seeing an example and even then one would really need to see the original slide which is of course impossible.

 

I use a 20x magnifier to examine my slides and I'm happy that I'm capturing all the detail in the slide using either my high end scanner or my DSLR copying setup - and yes, I would definitely recommend DSLR scanning  over a film scanner these days. However you do need an excellent lens as mentioned above, or actually a good 6-element enlarging lens and a bellows arrangement, but you do also need meticulous technique and a good knowledge of Photoshop.

 

I have to say that I suspect that the Pacific scanner might have flattered itself with its 5000 dpi claims and I also wonder about the effect of turning on all the "whistles and bells" in the software as this can degrade the image if used without necessarily knowing the effect of the individual settings. I see that its successor, the Pacific Poweslide X, is now only $849 at B&H and claims 10,000 dpi - I doubt it frankly. There can also be a problem with batch scanning slides as the focus may differ between slides, it would need to have a very proficient autofocus system and I don't see it mentioned in the manual. Could you perhaps try rescanning one of these 'soft' scans on its own and try and optimise the settings to see if you can improve on the batch fed result?

 

There is a very long thread on here about slide scanning, but, yes, the Nikon ES-1 and Micro-Nikkor come highly recommended, the copying stand/light box/enlarger lens method that I use is much more expensive to set up.

 

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/10989-slide-copying/

 

Edited October 28, 2019 by Harry Harrison

[TeeCee]

6 hours ago, Old school said:

 

Back to our original question…have any ALAMY contributors been successful in ‘digitizing’ their slides and if so, may we ask what the magic was you used simple enough for 'old school' photographers to master and won't cost a fortune?  We have perhaps 35,000 slides that are sitting in huge 1500 slide storage boxes and most of the 35K slides have been digitized by the 5000.  We are hopeful someone has mastered this photography challenge to benefit use of vintage slides for "old school' photographers.

Cheers, Flo and Paul

 

 

Flo and Paul, think you'll find many here (myself included) have "digitised" vast numbers of slides, both 35mm and 6x6. It appears you've provided adequate resolution in your processes so far, the answer now is in mastering the software to create the result you require from the files you have.
Photoshop is available on a monthly contract at a very reasonable rate, subscribe to that, and learn how to use it to your advantage - there are literally thousands of "how-to" videos on YouTube.

[Colin Woods]

6 hours ago, spacecadet said:

it's sobering to find out how bad one's technique was 30 years ago.

There are so many slides that I thought were quite good, that are now jarringly bad. I can also now see just how weak my cheapo zooms that I had when I first started were. There is something nice about physical film but I do not miss it at all. My D750 files are just so good.

[MDM]

2 hours ago, Colin Woods said:

There are so many slides that I thought were quite good, that are now jarringly bad. I can also now see just how weak my cheapo zooms that I had when I first started were. There is something nice about physical film but I do not miss it at all. My D750 files are just so good.

 

I don't miss film at all either and am so used to really high quality images with masses of detail and essentially noise-free. But it is not that film was intrinsically bad if used in decent kit (the lens being the primary quality-determing factor all else being equal) but it does look bad if digitised badly which is what most of us are doing. When I first got my LS4000 slide scanner back in around 2001 I think, I was amazed at the quality compared to my previous LS2 slide scanner scanner. But when I look at those scans now they look awful in terms of noise in and sharpness in comparison to images from my digital cameras, even the more basic ones.

 

However, a good traditional chemical print made directly from film will stand up very well beside a good chemical or inkjet print from a digital file. So it is really down to the digitisation process and one would have to go really high end to get equivalent digital files when viewed on screen. Copying using the setup mentioned above is the best I've done but, while very acceptable, it is still way off what I can do with a good digital camera. 

Edited October 29, 2019 by MDM

[Alex Ramsay]

As far as Nikon goes, for 35mm I use a D800 body with the PB-4 bellows, an old micro-Nikkor 55mm, and the PS-4 slide copying adapter, with an SB700 flash for illumination. It works pretty well for me, and is fast to use and to set up. Regarding medium format, Chuck is correct in saying that you can't fit a D800 onto an Illumitran, but what you can do is use just the Illumitran base unit (without the column) with the camera mounted to a copy stand above it. You may need to use an ND gel filter to reduce the flash output, though.

 

Alex

 

[spacecadet]

I got myself a bag of 1/4x20 bolts and wingnuts for the Illumitran, so I can adjust the standoff from the column. But I'm using Sony A58, which must be smaller. There's a maximum distance from the column to the centreline of the slide stage. I can still use the bellows for 35mm, and a 75mm enlarger lens, but the DLSR zoom on macro works for 6x6. It's archival route only though- they wouldn't pass QC.

I've made up a diffuser pack of drafting film and ND gel to get the exposure right. There's no comparison with the speed of a scanner- you can rattle through them at about 2 a minute.

Oddly though some DLSRs are fussy about firing the Illumitran flash. I sometimes have to draw the curtains and use open flash. Too lazy to get a £6 transmitter from China.

Edited October 29, 2019 by spacecadet