New computer toy
Dennis and the kids got me a little Vupoint film and slide scanner for Christmas and I've been playing with it for a couple of days.
I have about 150-200 slides from our school teaching days in Bolivia and I'm looking forward to scanning them. I already have prints of most of the negatives I own, but I'm sure I'll play with negative scanning too.
I have mixed feelings about the scanner. It seems to do fairly well on a typical image with scenery, but it loses all the detail in any large light areas. The adjustments I can make don't have much effect.
How can I complain too much, when I've created a number of acceptable digital images of slides that I haven't viewed in years?! However, it is frustrating to look at a perfectly good image through the viewfinder and then be unable to transfer what I see.
Screen shot of the preview of the slide
The scanned image -- best one I got after much tinkering
The scanner came with a program called Photo Impressions 6, but I am experimenting with scanning the images into some other image processing programs.
Here's one of the slides I scanned tonight. Dennis took this photo of me in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1981. If I remember correctly, there was a monument on this hilltop to the brave women of Cochabamba who defended the city against attack when all their men were doing battle elsewhere.
I'm not sure if this was before or after someone tried to cut into my purse with a razor blade at La Cancha, the huge, crowded open market. Fortunately, the purse was made of heavy leather with lots of seams, and the thief couldn't make a big enough hole to get anything out. I didn't feel the attack, and I was shocked when I saw the slashes.
6 comments:
That scan looks pretty good when it's enlarged.
My father took slides for many years when he and my mother traveled around the country in retirement. There are probably several thousand slides sitting in their slide trays. And I used to take slides, too. No one has looked at one of them in years. What a shame.
My wife and I are looking into getting a slide scanner for our slides of Ecuador taken in the 60's and 70's, but did not know what features to look for in the various choices. What do you mean when you write it "loses detail in large light areas"?
Guy, I added a set of images that should demonstrate pretty clearly how the detail is lost. The scanner overcompensates when there's a lot of contrast in the photo. I've read in various reviews that this is a common complaint with this scanner.
Thanks for the response.
You seem to be doing exactly what I've been unable to do. I know this must sound dreadfully dumb, but how do I transfer the picture on the slide to either Picasa or My Pictures as a picture, not a picture of a slide?
I've managed to get it into Picasa all right from my Epson Perfection 3170 scanner and there enlarge and edit to show only what I want. But if there's a way to save it at that point, I haven't been able to find it. I invariably end with a picture of a slide.
Emilie, you should be able to edit the image and then click "File". A menu will drop down and you can click "Save a copy as", I think, to save the image in its edited form.
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