(Read part 1 of my scanning story here) When my Mom and I were discussing this project and deciding on the scanner to buy, she was sure all her slides were 35mm slides. The other night she brought the first batch of slides over and we were anxious to see how they would scan. We fired up the scanner, loaded the transparency adapter with 4 slides, set it for 35mm color film, and scanned. Hmmm... the scanner cropped a rectangular area for each slide, but our slides have a square ratio. Uh-oh.

"Mom, are you sure you had a 35mm camera back then?"

Long story short, as I'm sure you've guessed... these slides were not from 35mm film! And the Canon ScanGear software only supports 35mm and 120 format slides. After some fiddling around in the ScanGear software, we figured out a way we could make it work with the least amount of cropping of the picture, but it meant each individual slide would have to be manually cropped, slowing down the whole project significantly. We'd have to sacrifice some of the tops and bottoms of the pictures, but the quality of what were were able to capture was impressive.

Later that night, I did some Googling and discovered that the slides are actually 126 "Instamatic" format. At that point I remembered Hamrick VueScan, a scanning software replacement which I've known about for some time, but never had a good reason to use until now.

I decided to give VueScan a try and it is just the thing! VueScan isn't like a typical TWAIN scanner driver that scans into another image editing program. It's a stand-alone program that works with just about every scanner. The user interface is very plain, but it offers every option imaginable for perfecting your scans. For this particular project, the stand-out feature was the ability to manually set and save the cropping options I needed for this particular slide format. It took an hour or two of tweaking, but once I had the settings perfected, I was able to breeze through the scanning process. With batch scanning and automated output enabled, VueScan even saved my scans with sequentially-numbered, user-definable file names in the location I chose. That made it easy for me to number the scans so I could match them up with the index card for each slide tray.

VueScan also supports color correction, infrared cleaning, grain reduction, color and fading restoration, sharpening, multi-pass scanning, and calibration. You can use it for scanning prints, transparencies (slides), and negatives. It supports saving to TIFF, JPEG, and Raw format. It offers a guided mode for beginners or an advanced mode for experienced users. Best of all, you can save all your setting to a file, and reload them when needed. So for my project, I have my current settings saved for Instamatic slides, but when I get to the 35mm slides, I'll be able to adjust the settings, save them, and switch conveniently between the two.

I'll have a more thorough review of VueScan soon, but for this project it will be a definite lifesaver! Yesterday I scanned a full tray--140 slides--and they look great! I know that flatbed scanners are typically not as good as a dedicated film scanner, but I'm very pleased with the results from this CanoScan 8400F (see prices). I'm scanning each slide to about 3200x3200 pixels which will give me plenty of resolution for touch-ups and printing at larger sizes. Yes, I am breaking the traditional rules by saving to the "lossy" JPEG format, but I am using very little compression, and I don't expect these to go through more than one additional editing session. I also didn't want to have to juggle multiple format copies of the files (TIFFs would have been too big for sharing with the family on CDs) and, most importantly, it's what Mom wanted! Besides, there's nothing evil about JPEGs if you know how to handle them, and they have a lot of advantages beyond the small file size--such as being able to embed captions, dates, and other EXIF metadata.

Our main purpose of getting these pictures scanned is to preserve them in a safer format, to make them more accessible to all our family members, and to clear some space in my parents' closet! I'm only 1/12th of the way through the slides alone (remember, I'm also scanning my own collection of photos from my pre-digital life) and I must say it is turning out to be a lot more fun that I thought it would be. So many memories are flooding back to me, and those outfits from the 1970's are just hilarious to look back on! If you're considering a project like this, you could pay someone else to do it at 30 cents to a dollar per slide, or you can take the challenge and experience the joy of doing it yourself. I think it will be worth it in ways that go beyond saving money.

For those that are wondering, the image above is of me, cropped from the scanned slide. The original image was taken in 1971. I used the Restore Fading feature in VueScan during scanning. In Photoshop Elements, I applied a small amount of "Smart Fix" and removed some specks of dirt using the spot healing brush. Then I cropped, resized, and sharpened for the Web.

Continued in part 3...

Related Articles:
- Getting Started Scanning
- Scanning Help and Tips
- Scanning Slides and Negatives
- Scanning Software
- JPEG Myths and Facts
- Scanner Information and Advice