I am digitalizing old 35mm color slides. Some of these are slightly underexposed due to camera failure, while others--I shot into the light so faces are rather dark. Looking at the slide, I can see people's faces; details are clear. However when I scan them in, the photos come out dark. Do you recommend any software to use with a Canon scanner so these photos will be very close to the original slides? Thank you.
MacBook Pro Retina
I recently scanned a lot of old photo prints with Canon CanoScan LiDE 220 (no support for slides). I tried VueScan but preferred the Canon software, might resort to VueScan if macOS support for the scanner ends someday.
AFAIK for photo prints, 300 dpi is fine in general; scan at 600 dpi to make sure you get all the details hidden in your prints. For slides and negatives scan at up to 4800-6400 ppi. It might be best to scan with billions of colors even B&W images and save as zip-compressed .tif. Then post-process with Lightroom to fine-tune cropping, exposure, shadows, highlights, color etc.
I scan at a resolution that will produce a 300 dpi print at the largest print size I'm likely to use. I scanned for 8" x 10" or 2400 x 3000 pixels.
So for a 35mm slide, 1.41" x .945", I scanned at 2500 dpi. Just some food for thought.
I downloaded a demo of VueScan. I couldn't find the right set up for slides, only photos. If you can post how to scan a slide, that would be fantastic. Thanks again for responding to this post!
I don't remember seeing those "transparency" options before. I'll check again. Thanks for sending.
I appreciate the update. Thank you.
I use VueScan with my Canon scanners, both flatbed and slide, and prefer it over the Canon software that came with the scanners. VueScan also has a demo version you can try before purchasing. The one thing it doesn't do is identify separated images in the same scan and save them as separate image files.
There is one app, it's free, that can do that is Image Capture. lt comes with the Mac and has some decent adjustment controls. Give it a try.
There are three options under Input: Basic, Standard and Professional:
I don't know what you're able to get with the demo version under Options. I purchased the Pro version quite a while ago and am glad I did.
My strategy for scanning has been to slightly overdo it so I don't have to do that clumsy and time-consuming task again.
I scanned the old prints at 600 ppi eventhough many very quite fuzzy to begin with. I also used billions of colors which increased the filesize for the archived .tif "raw" images (I used the lossless zip compression in the .tif files). But storage is quite cheap (I archive to 1.5-3TB HDDs). Most of the prints were B&W but I scanned them in color because allows me to fine-tune the conversion to B&W (I did that only to a very few images, though), and I left some in color for the mood.
Software for scanning slides
