Robert Ley wrote:
I am in the process of digitizing a color slide collection of 1000+ slides. I would like my kids and grand kids to be able to see them in the future.
I am using an old Bowens Illumitran and my Nikon D600. My plan is to record them as Raw and medium jpeg's.
Most of the images will not need raw processing as most are of historical purposes.
I am interested in getting the opinion from members who use Nikon as to what settings I should use for my jpeg's as I would like to do a minimum of corrections.
So far I have been getting good results and my setup seems to work well and it is much faster than scanning.
Thanks in advance for any insights you may be able to impart, even Canon users could respond
I am in the process of digitizing a color slide co... (
show quote)
Hi, Robert. You might be interested in the attached PDF white paper I wrote a couple of years ago.
I had an Illumitran 3c back in the 1980s. I used Kodak SO-366, a special order version of Ektachrome 5071 slide duplicating film with reciprocity characteristics suited to electronic flash exposure. It worked quite well! There is no reason why the Illumitran can't produce excellent results with slide-to-digital copy work, just as it did with slide-to-slide.
To start, use the Photo Style or Picture Style of the camera that is called Neutral or Natural.
Use FULL manual exposure when testing (and copying).
White balance a correctly exposed slide of a Delta-1 Gray Card, if possible.
If possible, test color with a correctly-exposed and color neutral slide of a Calibrite ColorChecker chart or equivalent.
Adjust Hue, Saturation, Color Tone or Tint, Sharpness, Contrast, and other parameters in your JPEG engine menu on the camera until the slide of the ColorChecker chart looks correct on your freshly-calibrated and ICC-profiled monitor.
Keep careful records of what works and what doesn't.
I never use auto-exposure or auto-white balance when duplicating. Auto features "want" the entire world to be 18% gray, and will shift exposure or white balance in the opposite direction of any color or exposure bias. If you feel you need a brighter JPEG or a better color balance, make changes manually.
I never use the camera's Electronic Flash White Balance setting, either, because electronic flash color temperature and spectral output characteristics vary WILDLY from brand to brand of flash. Camera manufacturers calibrate that setting to their OWN flashes.
You may need to make adjustments differently for different film emulsions. Kodachrome is inherently warmer than Ektachrome. Slides taken from different decades may have a different base tint and spectral response, depending on their process and structure.