> Any advice on cleaning slides? My father took lots of slides but never > thought about dust. Scanning them shows the dust up really well. How can I > remove it without damaging the surface of the slide? Cathy, I thought I might as well dive in here, even though I risk a response of horror from those who follow the expert opinions. (GDR). I have to qualify, though. If any slide is invaluable, please do not risk harsh treatment. I don't want to be pilloried for giving advice that led to the damage of a family heirloom! I must say that I do treat slides like that with the utmost care & do not risk doing anything that has even the potential for damage. To give background, I've got several thousand slides that are 30-40 years old, many of which are in terrible condition. Dirt, mildew, scratches, fingerprints, you name it. Fading & colour shift are also problems, although the Kodachromes (the bulk of the collection) have held up very well. To be blunt, the gentle techniques reccomended by the experts have done very little to clean up the worst slides. After scanning about 100 or so of the earliest slides, with miserable results, I noticed that there was also an even film of some sort that covered the emulsion side & slightly darkened the image, reducing contrast. It's hard to describe. The film only became obvious after vigourous brushing with a stiffer than normal brush - you could see obvious streaks where the film had been removed by some of the bristles, especially in areas of clear sky or in white highlights. I then tried a number of approaches, using slides that had little redeeming value. One thing I ruled out fairly early on was rubbing alcohol. It does help on some mildew cases, but not all. Moreover, if used in extreme, it can "melt" the emulsion & totally ruin a slide. It is very easy to pass the "cleaned as good as possible" point & go on to a badly damaged slide. Not worth risking, for me. The final procedure? I first blast the slide with a compressed gas duster. It is powerful enough to remove any loose dust - little squeeze bulbs come nowhere close. Hold the can upright & do not shake; otherwise the propellant will spurt out. I have not noticed any damage from the propellant, & have looked at the earlier trials to see if any has shown up after over a year - none is obvious. Then I use a lens cleaning paper or similar to rub the slide & I rub with a LOT of pressure, using several strokes. This removes the aforementioned film from the emulsion, as well as any dust or specks that are not embedded in the emulsion. The rubbing will cause some scratches, although I am amazed at how few & how minor they are. I find that these scratches are much easier to fix than what was there before. Then I blast the slide again, immediately before scanning. (For what it is worth, I'm using an HP S20 slide scanner.) Finally, I edit each image in a graphics program, & I have tried several. I generally spend 5-30 minutes per image, perhaps more in special cases. Photoshop 7 has made the job easier & produces much better results for me, especially using the healing brush tool & the patch tool. The job is very time consuming, though! I have cleaned up about 1,500 slides so far & am more than please with the results, only a handful of slides were beyond recovery. I should note that the original optical quality was about as good as you can get, in that a Nikon F was the usual camera, so the slides are worth saving for both image quality & image content. I only wish there were more pictures of people than of mountains (a lot of mountains have ended up in the circular file)! That about summarises my experience. My final advice boils down to: try everything you can think of, on images that are not important. Good Luck! Percy Thomas

--=======7DB64FBD======= Content-Type: text/plain; x-avg-checked=avg-ok-22EE4C5F; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Thanks to Evelyn, Bob, Ron and Percy. Next trip to a major shopping centre I'll check out what is in the photo=20 shops as I now have more idea what I'm looking for. Cathy At 09:44 7/04/2003 -0500, you wrote: > > Any advice on cleaning slides? My father took lots of slides but neve= r > > thought about dust. Scanning them shows the dust up really well. How = can I > > remove it without damaging the surface of the slide? > > > Cathy, --=======7DB64FBD=======--