Save Those Memories – Cine film to digital transfer
Call on: 01793 495733
Email: admin@savethosememories.co.uk
Address: 3 Lovell Close, Swindon, SN3 5BT
Save Those Memories – Cine film to digital transfer
Call on: 01793 495733
Email: admin@savethosememories.co.uk
Address: 3 Lovell Close, Swindon, SN3 5BT
I use three superb machines to get the very best from various formats of slides.
The Super Coolscan 9000ED and 5000ED are absolute marvels, giving unparalleled dust and scratch removal. It would be rare to find any slide archive that doesn’t need cleaning. However standard cleaning has always run the risk of making things worse and affecting the final image, plus good cleaning is expensive. The Digital ICE 4 Professional system for positive colour images will take away any worries about making things worse as the slide is never touched.
I also save printed photographs and regularly get suitcases and boxes full of old albums that need saving but are too much of a pain to do well within the family. The Epson V850 Professional is perfect for this when allied to the brilliant SilverFast imaging software.
Everything is done by hand and with care. So whatever you have I can get it sorted for you.
Hi Chris, Received the drive and the films back this morning. Had a quick scan of the files. Look fantastic, quality is superb and much of the footage is unseen as the stock was in such a bad state that it was un-viewable on my projector. Not just memories but a snapshot of the sixties. Great! Many thanks. Will recommend. Regards, Graeme H.
Some of the slide / image collections I get to see and work on can be massive, the largest so far is 9,204. However, for many people being faced with “just” 300 – 500 slides can feel like a daunting task. Most slide collections are created when an entire film of maybe 24 – 36 images were sent off and returned from the processors as 24 or 36 slides. It only takes 10 reels and you might suddenly have up to 360 slides.
For many people there will only be certain slides that hold any long-term interest these might be:
It could be that you are faced with 12 slides of Poole Harbour, none of which has a family member in and you never even owned a boat. At most I would whittle these down to a couple of slides to show that your family went there.
The good thing about slides is that you can get a general idea of the subject matter without the need for specialist equipment, in most cases just holding the slide up to the light will suffice. If you need or want to whittle your collection down, I would suggest sorting the slides into three distinct piles.
Definitely “Yes” – Definitely “No” – “Maybe”
Then once that is done, I would go through the “Maybe” pile for a second time sorting this pile between the “yes” and “no” piles so that you are ultimately left with only two piles.
In most large collections this might reduce the number slides that get digitized to 60 – 75% of the original total. Such that your original 360 slides are now only 250 or less.
The simplest way to get things moving is to either give me a call or drop me an email. We can go through what you have in your archive and what you are trying to achieve. Call: 01793 495733 (office) or 07940 810733 (mobile) email: admin@savethosememories.co.uk – for further details check the Contact page.
To be able to give you an accurate quote I will need to know how roughly how many slides you have. .
You are more than welcome to bring your slides here and we can go through them in person. Just get in touch and we can work out an appointment that will suit you. If you wish to use the postal service then I recommend using Royal Mail Recorded or Special Delivery.
Address: Save Those Memories, 3 Lovell Close, Swindon, Wiltshire, SN3 5BT
Please include in your package a covering letter with: Your return and contact details including a phone number and an email address.
Positive or negative images to either Bitmap .bmp or TIFF .tif files to include Digital ICE (positive colour only) Professional using the Nikon Coolscan 9000ED. Best Quality is scanned at 8 bit, 16 pass, with Digital ICE 4 Professional at around 60MB per colour image and also includes pre-scanning for best correction of colour, exposure and contrast. It’s only 6 slides an hour but it is worth it.
This IS NOT bulk processing and one size fits all saving but careful one by one archiving of your images.
35mm mounted slides and 35mm unmounted film strips
Medium Format film loose & mounted slides
Printed Photographs Loose or in Albums Call me to discuss, the questions I will probably ask is how are they presented, loose in their packets, loose in a flip album or stuck down in a page album with 40-year-old glue….
Glass Plates Large and Very Large format photographic image / glass plate digitisation is available by request with prices starting at £5 per image.
All Normal quality slides will be digitised using the Nikon Coolscan 5000ED or the Epson V850 professional using SilverFast software.
Normal Quality is scanned at 8 bit, 2 pass, with Digital ICE 4 at around 40MB per image.
35mm mounted slides only
The Nikon Super Coolscan 9000ED is still the only machine in the world developed with Digital ICE Professional for Kodakchrome. Launched in 2004 nothing has ever surpassed what Digital ICE Professional can do. Take a look at the two images to the left. The samples here are just a very small section of a larger slide, each head shot comprises what is in reality just a centimeter in size.
The untouched image (Left) is shot without Digital ICE and you can see the infection of dirt spreading out across the image like a spider’s web. Then I clicked on the Digital ICE Professional button and the same slide shows up looking perfect with the image on the right. Look at the forehead, no trace of dirt or damage. This is all done digitally, without physical cleaning which can damage the slide. At the highest settings of 16x fine scan with Digital ICE Professional the image will look perfectly clean and those years of storage, dirt and damage will just disappear.
Similarly, with these two shots, a small head shot is only a tiny part of the overall image, the untouched slide is very dirty with big blocks of dirt on the neck. After turning on Digital ICE Professional all of the dirt has disappeared. For both pictures above, look at the moles / blemishes on the neck and cheek, they both remain whilst all the damage around them is removed. No cleaning, no damage just time.
What this means is that however well or badly your archives have been stored my system and the time and care I invest in your images will get the absolute best out of them. If you have your images back as computer files Digital ICE Professional can save hours and hours of work in photoshop trying to clean the images up. You can now print and email images with only minor cropping or resizing so the image suits your needs.
With photographic material I get all sorts of archives from a few slides or printed photographs to many hundreds or thousands of images. Most customers want their images back as digital files. Either as .jpg, .bmp or .tif images.
Typically slides will be returned at around 5,500 x 3,500 pixels and about 60MB per image.
The key thing to remember, particularly for large archives is that I would like you to be able to quickly find the physical picture or slide that matches the digital image. To do this I take a lot of time creating folders that match how your archive is presented.
You might have a round slide carousel, or a small Kodak yellow cardboard box or the printed photos might be in a snappy snaps envelope or giant padded red velvet sticky album. Whatever format you have your images in I will create named folders so you can find what you are looking for. If you have something like 600 images they are going to be across many different envelopes, boxes or albums and I will name each one. So you will find folders like “Kodak B Durham 1976” or “Large white Envelope B” on your hard drive or USB stick.
Nowhere is my ethos of “Cheaply or Properly” more apt than with 35mm slides, medium format slides and strip film, particularly if you have any Kodakchrome film / slides in your archive. Digitising an old photographic image to the highest standards can be a painfully slow process if you want the best images, on my usual highest settings I can transfer about 60-80 slides in a 10 hour day. Of course, I can knock the quality down and get through 100+ slides, but the quality would inevitably suffer and I do not want you to be disappointed.
The digital image that can be retrieved from a slide or strip can be truly superb, as good as it can get in terms of pictorial quality so to skimp on quality at this point would be a real shame.
At best quality each image is scanned extremely slowly with each slide taking about 10-12 minutes. With Digital ICE Profesional and 16x scanning engaged the images will be as good as they possibly can be.
16x scanning means that the slide is scanned 16 times and each scan is interpolated to reduce noise, interference and inaccuracies. Most scanners can only do 1x which means “What you see is what you get” warts and all. The 9000ED will negate so many of these errors.
Nikon Super Coolscan Following on my general trend of only using the best possible equipment I have invested in a Nikon Super Coolscan 9000ED and the Nikon Super Coolscan 5000ED, which are the last great slide and image scanners than Nikon ever made. Both machines have won many awards for image quality.
Most machines can only “Scan” the image, the 9000ED can “Preview” before scanning and small changes to the settings can be made to make the image look as good as it can. If this is done before capture any changes you might make in Photoshop will be easier and the final outcome will be vastly superior. The Coolscan 9000ED is the only machine in the world with the ability to use Digital ICE Professional with a specific setting for Kodakchrome slides, so if you have any Kodakchrome slides in your collection the 9000ED will get the very best from them, see the “Digital Ice” section for further details.
At highest quality – you have a choice of 8bit or 16bit capture – 16Bit per colour channel means that the scanner can differentiate 65.536 hues of each of the three primary colours red, green and blue. It really is that good.
Research has shown that Digital ICE Professional is the best ICE system currently available, nothing has ever surpassed it, particularly if you have Kodakchrome slides in your collection.
If a Kodachrome slide is scanned as a normal positive, the image has a bluish cast that can look awful. While the colour of the sky and the water can be 75% corrected with Photoshop, it can be impossible to provide a natural green to the landscape. Kodachrome films are noted for their sharpness and brilliant colours and the abundance of colour shades. It is a shame to lose all of that advantage by using anything other than the Coolscan 9000ED.
An Overview DIGITAL ICE4 Professional Technology The newest, most complete package of automatic image correction technologies available in any film scanner. The award winning DIGITAL ICE4 Technology incorporates the following unique components:
DIGITAL ICE Technology – Removes Surface Defects (dust and scratches) DIGITAL ROC Technology – Restores and Corrects Color DIGITAL GEM Technology – Reduces Film Grain Noise DIGITAL SHO Technology – Optimizes Contrast and Exposure
The difference between having Digital ICE on or off is astounding it more than trebles the time taken to produce an image but the results are really worth it. Check out the samples page to see Digital Ice Advanced in action.