[filmscanners] Re: Scanning old slides

["Rob Geraghty" <robg@wordweb.com>]

"Preston Earle" <PEarle@triad.rr.com> wrote:
> I'm beginning to scan some old Kodachrome slides my father took 50-60
> years ago. They have a lot of dirt, dust, mildew, etc on both sides of
> the film. I'm planning to take them out of the original mounts and clean
> with PEC-12 and cotton pads on both sides, being particularly careful on
> the emulsion side. I'm planning to remount them in new plastic mounts
> and scan them on my trusty ScanDual II with Vuescan. Any thoughts and
> advice as to what I should be doing differently, or what I might do to
> clean the slides better and/or more safely?

Presumably the old slides are in paper mounts, so remounting them will be a
difficult thing to do.  I'm impressed!  My only suggestion here is maybe to
think about cleaning the non-emulsion side with PEC12, dusting them, and
making two scans - one before and one after cleaning the emulsion side with
PEC12.  The mould will have eaten the emulsion - but I am wondering if it
also softens the emulsion nearby.  I have found that removing the mould can
remove a significant amount of the image.  I was just thinking that if you
scan both ways it at least gives you a choice of which image to work with.
Once you clean off the mould damaged parts of the image, they're gone.  I
recently scanned some old slides (Kodachrome and Ektachrome) of my father's,
and while I couldn't use the IR channel on the Kodachrome, Vuescan's colour
restoration feature was AMAZING.  Anyway, take raw scans and you can always
recrop later.

It has been suggested to me in the past that particularly mouldy slides can
benefit from soaking in a small amount of PEC12 before trying to remove
anything - to loosen the mould first.

Others have been putting slides in anti-newton glass to ensure their
flatness before scanning.  I don't know how much that applies to Minolta
scanners as opposed to Nikon ones.

Rob

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