Very interesting set! It is comforting to see that the monastery and its monks have recovered from the March 2008 murderous repression by the Chinese authorities which left hundreds dead or jailed. Sera was then a hot spot of the Tibetan uprising. I have a set of slides I took in 1985 which look surprisingly similar...

Great shots. This city went through major rehab since the 70s when I spent a couple of years for study...
A minor detail: it's not a canal but the river Ill which crosses most of Alsace from South to North (ending in the Rhine at Strasbourg). Your first picture shows the part of the city which housed the tanner shops in medieval and later times.

Thank you Bill for all your inputs, I really appreciate. In the past couple of years I digitized my tens of thousands slides from 1970 upwards, using a set-up similar to yours: a Durst M-605 enlarger transformed into a copy stand, an old Multiblitz Side Duplicator flash formerly used for film duplication, with a couple of ND gels (because the flash intensity can not be adjusted). I used to copy the slides emulsion side up in order to focus on the film grain rather than through the acetate.
I find half a dozen color negs in my archive which I wanted to convert, reason why I was looking for an unexpensive piece of S/W.

I have been using PhotoLab and its predecessors for the past decade.

Thank you for your input. I use PhotoLab 5. I'll try your method with the color wheel functionality, at least for the final color adjustments.

Thank you indeed.

Thank you your input. I haven't noticed this functionality when I used Darktable in the past. I'll give it a go!

It's never too late... As I mentionned I took photos of the negs with my 24MB camera and a light calibrated light table, and saved them as JPEG and RAW files. I tried to convert them into positives with GIMP but I am not easy with that programme. I was wondering whether some of the other free S/W would be able to do the conversion and deal with the orange mask.

I have a bunch of color negatives which I photographed and saved as jpegs and RAW files. Is there a free programme which can handle the conversion into positives, including the neutralization of the orange mask ?
(I tried GIMP but the learning curve is a bit too steep).

It seems most of their products and spares are still widely available in Europe. List of vendors and models under:

https://geizhals.eu/?cat=acamblitz&xf=1537_Metz

(geizhals is a price comparator and product selector site for technical goods)

Thank you. Which reminds me that I still have a bunch of deep-frozen unexposed SO-366 since the mid-80s...

I used the copy method you mention (24Mb APS-C DSLR + 50mm macrolens mounted on my old enlarger column and an equally old Multiblitz Slide Duplicator flash with some ND gel filters to reduce the light intensity - this flash was formerly used for 3-6 ASA slide duplication ektachrome...) to digitize my 20 to 50 year old slide archive and I am pretty much happy with the results after PP the raw files with PL4. Timewise and cost wise, it beats any other method. (BTW, I shoot the slide with the emulsion side up to the lens to avoid shooting through the film layer itself and flip the picture back in PP).

What I haven't tried yet is the digitization of color negs and I wonder which stand-alone software you would use for the conversion, knowing that PL4 doesn't offer this function ?

Superb!

BTW, you left Switzerland and this is Italy...

Faststone is basically a photo viewer with some editing functions in RGB. Affinity is a full blown photo processor recommended for those who do not want the steep learning curve and the mandatory subscription of Photoshop.
If you can get it as bargain, buy it!

A free and portable app "crystaldiskinfo" (32 or 64-bit) will help you monitor the health of your HDDs. If one or several control points become yellow or red, it's time to look at it. Read the associated readme file to understand what the failures may be (before a final crash).