Recommendations for Scanning Slides

ProfHankD wrote:

Entropy512 wrote:

ProfHankD wrote:

paul wassermann wrote:

Thanks! I just solved my problem ( I think). I have a light tablet, have made a painter's tape rectangle just slightly smaller than a 2 x 2 mounted slide. I can just carefully slide the slide in under an edge of the tape. I set up my Sony a9 with 90mm macro lens on a small tripod with the camera carefully positioned square with the slide surface. Two second delay after a shutter press and the image is captured. So far I am really impressed with the detail still preserved in these vintage film images. I am able to clean, load, and photograph a slide in about 30 seconds; the camera does a wonderful job selecting exposure and white balance. So far, so good and have done about 100 slides.

Pretty close to what I was about to suggest (Duplihood ).

However, try putting your A9 into multi-shot auto HDR mode. Slides commonly have about 2 stops of extra DR that is encoded with wildly wrong (too dark) tonality, making it invisible to humans viewing the projected slide, but the huge DR of the auto HDR mode and tone mapping it applies often can pull those shades back into useful scene detail.

Alternatively, just bracket raw and feed the results to hdrmerge - https://github.com/jcelaya/hdrmerge - rather than trust whatever the camera does internally as far as tonemapping.

Lots of tools can do HDR processing, but the Sony in-camera version actually does surprisingly better than most in this case, which is an odd case because the extra info isn't with appropriate brightness to scale normally. The tone mapping just happens to do well with it.

The other issue is that you might need as much as 6 stop HDR coverage, and bracketing on many cameras doesn't handle that well. It also means a pile of raws because it's best done with more than two shots. Still, you are absolutely right that you can do a little better with raw captures and really careful tweaking of the tone mapping....

6 stop not handled well by most cameras?

I'm not sure of any camera that doesn't offer 5-shot 2EV steps (8EV between maximum and minimum), or 3-shot 3EV (exactly 6EV total)

I guess maybe I'm spoiled by Sonys, even really old Sony bodies (like the A6000) did 3-shot with 3EV steps per shot?