Prints from 35mm slides

Had a few people recommend DS Colour Labs, not yet used them myself

https://dscolourlabs.co.uk/

I have a slide scanner. It's mediocre.

I spoke with a professional independent photography place about cleaning up slides and basically got told "yeah no."

I would respectfully suggest that a high quality A4 print from a slide may be optimistic.

Probably not local to you, but Cambrian Photography in Colwyn Bay are very good. I'm confident that they could advise you what is possible (or not).

<p style="padding-left: 40px;">Find me a time machine and I can probably just about remember how to run this beauty. Double oil mount the transparency and quality would be too notch.</p>

Possibly go down the scan route then print? http://theslideconverter.co.uk/

Ive not used them but it looks interesting. Cleaning the slides seems to be part of the process and quality looks like it will be excellent

I would respectfully suggest that a high quality A4 print from a slide may be optimistic

Never used to be a problem when I shot exclusively on slide film. It's not a cracked slide, faded slide from the 1960s so it's a case of finding a lab with the right equipment to do a traditional enlargement rather than run it through a crappy high street scanner and then print off the digital image. Not saying all scanners are crappy but can't imagine it's high volume for Max Speilman and the likes so not worth them investing in expensive kit.

I spoke with a professional independent photography place about cleaning up slides and basically got told “yeah no.”

I would respectfully suggest that a high quality A4 print from a slide may be optimistic.

Depends what question you asked.

"Can you scan this box of hundreds of unlabeled slides that have been stored in my grandparents dusty atic for decades for me, and touch them up just in case there are any worth keeping, it'll only take you a few minutes and cost you nothing as you've got the kit" = a hard nope

Even with the recent uptick in film photography I doubt any labs are turning away work.

Ag Photographic + Photolab, based in Birminham in my experience are the absolute best anywhere in the UK when it comes to scanning film. They run a film scanning service linked below.

https://www.ag-photolab.co.uk/product-category/film-scans/

It shouldn't make any difference whether you are scanning slides, or negatives. If anything, slides are slightly easier to scan. If you are going for a large print I would recommend selecting the 'Noritsu Large Scans of Individual Frames' option, which is £3.69. You'd just have to pay postage to get them there and return postage, which is £4.94 on top of this.

The scans, which will be delivered to you on CD-ROM should come back looking very good. However, if there are any scratches or marks visible - these can easily be removed using 'healing tool' in the free Snapseed photoediting app, available for Android, or IOS.

35mm slide film has very high resolving power and should easily be able to produce a really good 12x8 print.

Home scanning of slides and film is also a viable (but quite costly!) option. I have a Plustek Opticfilm 8100

https://www.filmscanner.info/en/PlustekOpticFilm8100.html

Which was about £200 used from eBay. It gives me really shar, clean 18 MP scans of my negatives. See an example of mine below:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/154248583@N08/52823410971/in/dateposted-public/

Unfortunately, for this you'll also need a Lightroom software subscription + buy the Negative Lab Pro plugin, whic adds up the costs somewhat for a few scans! 😂

Brilliant - thanks 🙂

Just to add for anyone in the Glasgow area I used this company last year to get a few slides scanned. Small operation out a house in Kelvindale but did the job.

http://www.photoscot.co.uk/info/scanning.aspx

See an example of mine below:

Nice!