The common consensus amongst the photography sites is that setting up a decent camera on a tripod and placing the slides on a homemade light-box and photographing them is far superior to any of the purpose-made "digitizers"
A LED flashlight with a large lens - large enough for a slide to lay on - can be your light-box.
You just need to anchor the flash-light so it will remain exactly in one place and rig some simple guides on the lens so that the slides always land in the exact same spot.
Thus, once you get your camera and tripod situated, every "scan" will be identical in size and all will be centered instead of being chased around.
Regardless of whether you do this with a camera or with a purpose-made digitizer device, once you get all your slides digitized, they will still be "Negatives" and also not color correct.
You will have to use a program like simple Photoshop Elements to make them viewable.
If you go with Photoshop, I strongy recommend one of the much older, mush stabler, much more user-friendly versions with no version more recent than Elements 12 and I much prefer Elements 7 over that; but, anything 12 or older wil be fine.
Anything more recent is just asking for a bunch of unnecessary headaches and won't do the job any better and maybe not as well.
Totally FREE GIMP is well capable of the task; however, seeing as you are here asking how to do this, GIMP may be way over your head; I have been doing this for years and GIMP often feels way over my head --- but is FREE and it is POWERFUL --- just not for the timid-hearted.
Download it for FREE, install it on your desktop, and watch some YouTube videos specifically for using GIMP to digitize slides and you can learn it soon enough --- actually easier if you don't know a thing about any other program as that will only confuse you when using GIMP.
Another FREE photo editor, fairly easy to use, is Picture Window Pro.
Chasys Draw IES is another good FREE one.
XnViewMP, also FREE, can probably do what you will need and it has a huge support forum where you can get questions answered.
Actually, if you only ever look at a single photo, there are three FREE programs that I wouldn't be without
1. = FastStone Photo Viewer - a definite must have that I use a thousand times every day
2. = digiKam - has the absolute best bullet-proof rock-solid keyword tagging ability that trumps anything anywhere no matter how much it costs
3. = XnViewMP to quickly view any and all types of photo metadata and edit that metadata.
I hope I haven't given you information overload --- just know that no matter how you digitize your slides, you are still going to have to "cook" them before you can view them.
Although any old digital camera can photograph slides and do a good job, the more megapixels the camera has, the larger the end product will be.
This is hard to explain --- it has to do with resolution.
I guess a simple explanation is the more megapixels the camera has, the more digital content you will capture in your photographed slides and the larger they can be viewed and printed.
That is something you should ask before laying down your money for any purpose-made digitizer = what are the end pixel dimensions of the end product --- how big is it going to be.
A bunch of postage-stamp-sized photo files aren't going to be very useful nor viewable on anything larger than a cell-phone screen and that is what you will get with many of the highly advertised digitizers.
To give you something for comparison, straight out of the camera photo files from my Canon 7DMkII with 20.2 megapixels capability are 35mm equivalent 3:2 ratio and measure 5496 x 3670 pixels.
YouTube has a gazillion videos about using a DSLR camera to digitize slides.
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BobDinNC wrote:
