Nicholas Hellmuth relates his considerable experience scanning 35mm slides with Polaroid, Nikon, Fuji, and Creo EverSmart Supreme scanners.

How to get the utmost quality from scanning your 35mm slides.

FLAAR scans its 35mm slides to obtain outstanding color, clear detail, and achieve large-format enlargements in museum-exhibit quality.

Step 1: select which scanner is appropriate for your needs (you can e-mail the review editor if you need help, Nicholas Hellmuth, FLAARMaya@aol.com; just be realistic, don't ask us to recommend a $700 scanner to do a professional quality job... if you want to be a pro you have to upgrade to the right equipment and naturally good equipment has a good price.

For home use budget under $2000, for office use $2000-$2500; for studio use $12,000; for prepress work, professional scanners go for $14,000 to $45,000.

There is no charge for information on help in deciding what scanner to select; FLAAR is nonprofit; our university sends the reports at no-cost.

Although today we admittedly prefer the absolute best slide scanner, we started with a Polaroid slide scanner, then used several Nikon scanners. But once we tried out the Fujifilm Electronic Imaging Lanovia C-550 and then the EverSmart Supreme, we never even plugged in our toaster-shaped slide scanners again.

Step 2: take the time to learn your scanner's software. If you have a good scanner its software will be better than Adobe Photoshop. This means you do all the color correction and all tweaking in the scanner software, before you press the SCAN button. You never have to set foot in Adobe Photoshop (other than to re-size your image and do minor fine-tuning).

SilverFast is by far the best software for all home and office scanners. Silver Fast is superior to all the scanner software that comes with your scanner (yes, Silver Fast is easier to use than even the revered LinoColor software from Heidelberg).

For professional use (by photographers, artists, designers, and definitely for prepress), Creo scanning software is outstanding. Just look at the scans we got from Creo hardware and software (the colorful images below).

Hewlett-Packard DesignJet 2800CP large format printer prints 36" wide. We have subsequently replaced this with first a 60" HP DesignJet 5000 for one office; we liked it so much we got a second HP 5000ps, 42" wide, for our other office.

Every print in this picture was done from a tiny 35mm color slide. Not bad, yet you too can achieve this quality.

Can a Nikon or Polaroid scanner do this? Barely, you can get a print to 24" from the Nikon 2000 scanner. But if you want the quality shown here, you need a Creo EverSmart Supreme or at least their Select scanner.

If you fail to learn how to handle your scanner software, and instead do your digital imaging in Adobe Photoshop (after you finish the scan) your resulting pictures will be not as good as the ones seen here (keep in mind that the images got trashed getting onto the Internet; they were photographed with a small digital camera and then compressed with JPEGing. The quality of the original color prints is far superior to what we can show you on the Internet.

Photoshop is ideal for repairing lousy scans. All the informative books on Adobe Photoshop show you the tricks on how to take a bad scan of an awful slide and get a usable picture out at the end. But why do bad scans? Why not accomplish a good scan to start with?

And why take bad photographs? Wouldn't it be better to take better photographs at the beginning? Check out cameras-scanners-flaar.org and digital-photography.org to help improve your photography.

Caution: yes, Umax PowerLook III is an outstanding scanner for home or office; so is the LinoColor/Heidelberg Saphir Ultra. They are great (we have two of them at FLAAR). But for 11x17 inch flatbeds, the Creo iQsmart or Fuji Finescan 2750 are much superior to any offering from Umax or Heidelberg-LinoScan. At the top end (the high end), the Heidelberg NexScan is considered good. But in that range I happen to prefer the Creo Creo EverSmart Supreme since I have more experience with this. This is because a Creo Supreme is sitting next to me as I write this. Creo -Europe provided outstanding technical training to me in Brussels, as well. I am sure if I had been trained at Heidelberg headquarters and had a Heidelberg NexScan in my office I would find many fine features as well. But I use the Creo Supreme every day and its software is truly excellent, ideal for photo archives, design, general scanning, and perfect for professional prepress use (sure costs less than a drum scanner).

In you wish a "second opinion" from other perspectives on scanning 35mm, medium format, or large format transparencies, consult with the scanning specialists at Parrot Digigraphic: contact is imaging@parrotcolor.com.


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