Slide cleaning, scanning and enhancement recommendation?

[jezgb]

A friend has a large collection of slides taken by her late father, including some from Brands Hatch showing the likes of Graham Hill, Jim Clark etc racing, which she would like to get scanned and maybe processed to enhance their quality.

Problem is that they are showing signs of degradation which might be mould...

Can anyone recommend a company able to clean slides, make high quality scans of them and maybe perform some image processing?

Ideally in London / south east (she's in Kent), but not essential.

Thanks!

 

[ChrisR]

A friend has a large collection of slides taken by her late father, including some from Brands Hatch showing the likes of Graham Hill, Jim Clark etc racing, which she would like to get scanned and maybe processed to enhance their quality.

Problem is that they are showing signs of degradation which might be mould...

Can anyone recommend a company able to clean slides, make high quality scans of them and maybe perform some image processing?

Ideally in London / south east (she's in Kent), but not essential.

Thanks!

I don't have a direct answer, but I can say that I have a collection of my late father's 6x9 Dufaycolor slides from between 1935 to 1955 that I scanned (with help from @PMN of this forum). These had a variety of marks on them. I tried all sorts of means including scrubbing with cotton buds dipped in IPA (isopropyl rather than India Pale!), and I could shift almost none of them.

That said, I looked at a few of the bulk scanning services, and Mediafix claims to "clean" the slides with compressed air., and also do colour correction. From my own experience scanning my old slides, once they's been through the projector a few times they will have picked up dust, so this may be worth doing. A few specifically suggest weeding out slides with dust and/or mildew as not worth doing. I think you'd need to tall to any service before proceeding!

For my own retro-scanning project, I decided against sending them off. It seemed to me to be important to keep groups of slides together, and to record any information on the slide. For a 3 week new Zealand trip from 1974 I ended up even recording the slide numbers and their colours in order to try to get them back into a reasonable order (which was important to me to try to work out where they were taken, YMMV). Anything written on the slide could be really useful. Yes, you will recognise Jim Clark, but maybe not the bloke in the next slide who turns out to be an uncle she's never met! However, I wouldn't want to discourage her from going ahead; in both cases I have found it very rewarding. (I'm currently slowly going through and scanning a large box of me father's black and white negatives, I wish he hadn't stored the out of focus ones as well as the decent ones...)

 

[jezgb]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply! The collection is mainly "Uncle Stan and Aunty Shirly" I think, with just a few "interesting" ones that are the ones she wants to have cleaned and scanned etc.

TBH, I think her best bet is to have them scanned (she doesn't have a scanner) and then do what she can in Photoshop (her husband is a [amateur] photographer and so has some skill with it, and I would be happy to help).

Good luck with your scanning project!


Cheers,

Jez.