I found some old photo albums and slides (mostly dating back to '80) and I’m considering digitalizing some of them.
How would you proceed in my shoes?
I have a decent mirrorless camera (plus minimal editing skills) and an office scanner, but I’m open to buy extra equipment. I’m also open to sending the lot to some third party studio that specializes in the task, but if possible (and if it’s not much more costly) I would prefer to DYI and process the photos/slides as I review them.
As long as the photos are not damaged, the office scanner will probably be ok. Flatbed scanners are easy to use, and you can usually scan multiple photos and break them up in software. You can use a scanner with a feeder if the photos are in good condition, but there’s a small risk of them getting damaged, so test the scanner with a sacrificial photo first. I’ve heard of feeders scratching or creasing the photos, but it’s a very small number of cases as far as I can tell.
I’ve found that 600 dpi is a good tradeoff between quality and file size for your typical 6 x 4 inch photo from back then, but I increase the dpi for very small photos to try to get a bit more detail out of them.
I tried every piece of scanning software I could find on Linux, except for Vuescan*, and got some decent results, but none of them beat the Epson package for Windows. The quality was about the same, but the Windows package had built in presets that corrected the colour and brightness with a single click. Nothing that couldn’t be done in a decent photo editor, but it let me preview the changes before scanning, and was much faster. It even corrected photos with that reddish tint all over.
*The only reason I didn’t try Vuescan was because I didn’t want to buy software for what was going to be a short term one off task.