What services do you offer for scanning 35mm slides?

We offer three different levels of service:

1. Basic Slide Scanning includes scanning your slides and performing basic automatic corrections to the raw images that come out of the scanner producing a finished scan of a slide.  
   
   This is the service we expect most people will start with in scanning their slides.  We first take your slides in whatever packaging you bring them to us (e.g., in boxes, or projector trays) and load them into our Carousel trays properly orienting for scanning.  Then we scan the slides.
   
   This service includes possible rotation of slides for correct orientation (landscape versus portrait), simple color and exposure correction and simple dust removal.
   
   Most slides shot by our customers need adjustments to the exposure and white balance to look their best. There are automatic tools for performing simple types of such corrections on a batch of scanned images. More sophisticated adjustments to bring out the maximum detail in a slide require significant additional manual work and are provided in the advanced manual  service below.
   
   Finally, most slides that come to us have dust particles on the surface of the slide.  Once slides are properly loaded into the Carousel trays we use compressed air to blow dust off the surface of the slides.  This clears away some of the dust, but many times dust remains.  We never touch (and you should resist touching) the surface of a slide to clean it.  A better approach is to use digital tools to remove the image cast by a dust particle.  We use such automatic tools to get rid of small images of dust that ruin a photo -- such as a speck of dust on a person's face.  Larger dust, dirt and scratches may still be present and will not be cleaned up by automatic tools.
   
   Most slides that are in good condition (good exposure, white balance and limited dust) that go through the basic service look quite good and no further effort (or expense) needs to be done for them to be viewed and used in subsequent projects.  
   
   At this point, we recommend that customers pick up their orders and review their scans to decide which scans, if any, they want to use our advanced manual service.  For at least three months, we keep the scans of all orders. If you want us to do further processing on a selection of your scans, all you need to do is send us an email listing the unique names of the scans on which you wish us to do further work.
   
   You can read about these corrections in another FAQ Answer that is about automatic corrections to all scanned photographs regardless of original media.
   
   
2. Advanced Manual Corrections
   This level of service provides all of the Basic Slide Scanning services, plus additional manual corrections to deal with finer tuned adjustments to all of the automatic corrections.  Typically people will identify a subset of the slides they scan which are important to them for this level of corrections.
   
   
3. ​Economy Slide Scanning
   This level is for customers who want to do all of the pre-scanning slide preparation and post-scanning image corrections. These activities are the part of Basic Slide Scanning that the customer must do for themselves when scanning at this reduced cost level of service.