More Slides from the 1950s

More progress on my Slide to Digital image project this week!

I visited my parents two weeks ago and picked up another big box of slides from the 1950s and 1960s. The first thing I did was to sort the slides by year and jot down the who, what, where and when of each slide.

A few days later I started scanning the slides. I had already decided which groups of slides I wasn't going to bother with due to their poor quality color/exposure and the fact that the subject matter wasn't particularly interesting to me.

I am using the Wolverine Slide and Negative Scanner that I found on Amazon last year. It does a good job of duplicating the quality of the slides and is easy to use. I found that setting up an old slide light table is the easiest way for me to get through the slides and keep track of what I've scanned. I am working on one year at a time on the light table - for the most part I have between 20 and 40 slides per year. Dad and I weeded out the slides that were not of our family before I even brought them home.

Yesterday I got about 130 more slides from 1953-1959 scanned, catalogued, and uploaded to Adobe Photoshop Elements. Here is the setup I'm using - my light table, my slide scanner, and my list of slides to be scanned - along with the box of chronologically sorted slides.

 

The scanner is easy to use, but takes some getting used to. You have to put three slides at a time in the tray that feeds through the scanner. Once the tray is closed an pushed into the scanner,  you just push the scan button once to get the image, then press the button again to save the photo image to the memory card that is in the scanner. This little black box is plugged into a power strip to run, but doesn't need to be plugged into a computer to scan. I find it much easier to work at my kitchen table than up in the computer room which has very little space to spread out on.

 

The middle slide in this photo has to be turned 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise to be scanned since the opening on the top of the tray is rectangular. You can rotate the image on the scanner before you save it to the memory card, or I just wait until the image is uploaded to PhotoShop to fix it.

The most time consuming part of the process is on PhotoShop once the images are uploaded. Uploading from the scanner to PhotoShop is simple - I just plug the scanner into the computer via USB cable and use PhotoShop to find the photos on the memory card that I haven't uploaded yet.

Once in PhotoShop Elements, I follow these steps (sometimes in batches):

1. I immediately tag them all with a category (for example, Slides 1954_1964) so that they are easy to find later.
2. I add a caption to each photo with names, place and a date.
3. I use Autocorrect to fix lighting, levels and color on the image - many times this is good enough for the slides that aren't damaged or had bad lighting.
4. I set the internal date on each photo based on what I could figure out from the slide - some of them were already written on by my dad or grandpa. Some of them have the date they were developed, although this is not usually the date that they were taken. Sometimes it's over a year later than the original shot date. I can usually figure out from who it is, what we are wearing, where we are, if it's a holiday, the time of year, etc.
5. Then I start working on the slides that I want to get prints of right away and decide if they need to be fixed in PhotoShop. I try to get all the dirt and dust particles cleaned up, taking the most time on people's faces and anything that really detracts from looking at the photo. Sometimes I have to fix dark or overexposed photos. Sometimes I crop a little to remove things in the background, but for the most part I want to see the background because it's an important part of the story behind the photo.

I did all five steps for 30 photos that I wanted to get prints of, and today I uploaded those to my Persnickety Prints account and ordered my 4" by 6" matte prints. Three of the photos were vertically oriented, so I decided to order those as 3" by 4" matte prints. I can either put them in the small pockets of my pages, or I can mount them on a 4" by 6" card and use them that way.

Here's one of my favorite photos from this batch. My two great-grandmas at our 1957 Christmas party in Ohio.

I already received an e-mail that my prints are done and will be shipping out tonight. Can't wait for the next step of the project - putting them in my scrapbook. It's starting to look pretty good now, and I think I've got all the photos and memorabilia from 1954 - 1957 that I wanted to save in my scrapbook now. Next time I will document how I'm planning my layouts by year.