Having scanned all the negatives in the main cardboard boxes where our print photo folders are stored (although I’m sure there are still some others), I had a break from scanning, partly because of the hot weather and partly to concentrate on the building work.

I recently restarted scanning, this time on the transparencies. Initially they were more difficult with the higher contrast and the different film types. The VueScan program has some in-built correction for different colour negative films but only distinguishes between Kodachrome and other colour slide films (Kodachrome uses very different dyes from other films and was purposely biased for projection with a tungsten light). However, having now scanned twenty boxes (so about 700 slides) I think I’ve resolved many of the difficulties (or at least am getting results which I think are satisfactory).

However the scanning seemed to be taking a lot longer at 10-13 minutes for each slide. I was also saving 48-bit TIFF files as well as JPEG files since the images were much more variable and differing in contrast and I thought I might do more editing on them. So it was taking about 2-2½ hours per slide carrier which contains 12 slides. Realistically that means I could leave the scanner to scan one batch of 12 slides between breakfast and lunch, another batch after lunch and early evening (or afternoon tea if I come in),  another two in the early and late evening, and a batch overnight – so often not even two boxes of 36-39 slides a day.

However I decided, as with the negatives, I could always rescan the slides which were of particular interest so have switched to saving 24-bit TIFF and JPEG files (as they are the quality required for prints) which has reduced the time per slide to about 7 minutes.