Hi folks,

has anyone here got any experience with producing high quality scans from old 35mm colour slides?

I've got a batch to do (not in a professional capacity, thank the blazes ... :P ) that are about 30 -35 years old. The problem is that some of them are appearing with small marks across them, rather like dust specks on a DSLR sensor. Only there are hundreds of 'em on each of the affected slides!

The slides that I've done so far were all gently brushed, and then blown clean prior to scanning, and the scanner was blown clean between each batch. Looking closely at an affected slide, the marks are barely visible, even under a magnifying glass, but they are there on the scans, looking almost like mold on the image.

What I'm wondering is, can they be 'swabbed' clean prior to scanning?

The images are far too valuable for me to risk a "try it and see" approach, in case they get damaged. Thats why I thought I'd ask to see if anyone could offer any authoratative advice?

I can post a crop from a scan if anyone is interested.

With slides of that age it could well be mould and the scanner will just make it worse.. If this is the case then little can be done, apart from editing the image after scanning.

You could try a dedicated film scanner rather than using an addon for an existing scanner, these have a much higher DPI and should give better results but the mould will still show.