Converting Old Slides to Digital
I've been working on a number of archival tasks for both my family and my wife's family. This is mainly digitizing old videos, photos, 8mm, and others so that we have a solid digital repository of this stuff.
My main focus has been the 8mm videos as those are the most interesting as well as the most hands off to do. I'm using a Wolverine device to convert them. Is it the best quality? Absolutely not. Is it good enough for what the family wants? Yes it is.
Unfortunately, after doing a LOT OF CONVERSIONS, the device burned out. And, my photo scanning is with a flat bed, and not really viable for the amount of photos I have.
Putting both of those projects on hold, I decided to start working on the slides.
I don't have, nor do I really want to get, a dedicated slide scanner. But, what I do have is a digital camera, macro tubes, and a lighttable.
Enter this madness:
So what I have here is a tripod with my Canon 6d Mark 2 attached to it. I've got 48mm of macro extension tubes on my 24-105mm f/4L lens. The slide is on the light table. Since the focal plane is SO NARROW, I've got a portable LCD screen hooked up to it so that I can more easily focus. And then it's tethered to the PC for instant edits.
On the surface, seems pretty easy right? NOPE.
The focal plane is stupidly narrow. So if the camera is tilted at all, you'll end up with part of the slide in focus, and part of it out of focus.
And, in my case, some of the slides aren't perfectly in focus to begin with, so that makes it even more annoying.
You also have varying thickness on the cardboard slides as well, which messes with the focus, resulting in more adjustments per slide.
But, once all is said and done, it's not too bad. I'm getting about 19mp per image, which is pretty dang good in my opinion.
Some results below:
Below is a 100% view. Straight out of camera, no clean up or editing. Detail captured is pretty good.
I can do a slide, including pulling from the stupid wheels, every 7 seconds or so, so this method is much faster than trying to scan them.
I'm hoping to get some more wheels to test on next week, so let's see what else I can do here.