Things You'll Need

Instructions

1

Select your slides and load them carefully into the slide holder, which holds three slides at a time. Load the film emulsion down. You must load all slides horizontally, which you can rotate in your image-editing program after capture. Although many systems allow you to rotate and flip the images during the scan process, I recommend you do this after capture in your image editing program.
2

Clean the slides thoroughly and carefully. Use canned air to remove any dust from both sides of the transparency. If the slide has something stuck on the surface you can use a Q-tip and some film cleaner or grain alcohol to remove it. Use the canned air again after removing the artifact. Do not rub too hard since you can scratch the emulsion.
3

Once the slides are cleaned, immediately load the holder into the scanner. Make sure the scanner is set to COLOR SLIDE. The ION device and most scanners can scan color positives (slides) and color and monochrome negatives. Then click OK, which will scan the image and present a menu allowing you to save your image to the SD card. It takes under a minute to actually scan and save the three images. Once you have filled up the SD card you can connect the scanner to your computer and set it to USB mode. Your computer will recognize the device as a camera and allow you to upload your images and delete them after upload. Of course, if your computer can read SD cards, you can just pop the SD card out of the scanner and insert into your SD card reader
4

No matter how hard you try to eliminate dirt and dust, you will need to bring your image into an image-editing program. Old slides may have faded and gained in contrast depending on their age and how they were stored. In an image editing program you can clean up the artifacts and adjust the exposure and contrast as well as crop your photo memories. Not all slides will scan well. Slides with false colors, specular highlights and faded dyes may not look good no matter how much you edit them. So far I have about a 75 percent success rate on "keepers" from the 300 or so scans that I have done. It is fun, easy and doesn't have to be expensive. This picture of me at work in the '70s was lost and now it's found. What treasures are waiting in your attic?