Best thread ever!! Fantastic stuff and thanks for taking the time to scan these wonderful images – very much appreciated 😉 Could I ask what scanner/software you use and how much time it takes to scan an “average” slide? I have plenty of my fathers and uncles slides that I would like to share with you of similar subjects…

Kodak,

Well thank you for that. It is appreciated.

I use a three year old ‘Epson Perfection 3200 Photo’. This has proved to be an excellent general purpose scanner. Although a flat bed, it has various attachments to scan slides, and negatives of various formats.

It will scan four slides in one operation. For these slides I have scanned at the ultimate quality setting at 3200 dpi. This is a ten minute cycle. Some, with more expertise than myself, may well consider this way over the top but in many of these slides the aircraft is but one quarter of a square inch in surface area, so perhaps 50-80% of the slide has been cropped away. At this stage I would level horizons by rotation and if a small element of structure such as a wing tip was missing leave sufficient scope to clone in a bit of adjacent scenery to balance the image.

I do not know what camera was used to take the majority of these slides but I would suggest it was quite a modest affair for 1970 with a standard 50mm and a non zoom telephoto. You will have noticed the slightly sluggish shutter causing the image to darken on the RHS.

To this cropped result I have used Paint Shop Pro to colour balance and remove the colour ‘caste’ usually blue/violet. Contrast to taste with a tendency to embolden the image, a pinch of colour saturation adjustment if they all looking a little washed out and finally a little sharpening using the ‘unsharp mask’ facility.

Just basic stuff compared to what I know can be done by the professionals, but it is amazing what 21st century technology can do to quite modest and mundane 1970’s slide images.

Again my special thanks to Ray Wood for making these shots available.

Mark