Photographic slides from JPEGs

[Jon Finch]

There are a few companies that offer a service to create a physical slide from a JPEG image. Has anyone ever tried it and, if so, with what result? Are there any pitfalls that one needs to be aware of?

[ktinkel]

There are a few companies that offer a service to create a physical slide from a JPEG image. Has anyone ever tried it and, if so, with what result? Are there any pitfalls that one needs to be aware of?Haven’t tried it, but can think of a pitfall: if the jpeg is low-res or noisy, this may be amplified in the slide.

How small an order will they accept? Maybe give it a try with a varied handful of images. (And then report back! :))

[terrie]

jon: Are there any pitfalls that one needs to be aware of?The only real problem that I could see is, as KT mentions, saving the jpg with a low quality level...other than that, there should be no problem...

I have used EZSlides (http://www.ezslides.com/index.html) to have my slides done--from digitially based images--and here's their page on jpg's (http://www.ezslides.com/jpg.htm)...

Terrie

[Jon Finch]

Thanks for that advice, it is similar to that of various websites that I've researched. At present, our customer has provided us with low resolution JPEGs, which, we've advised, aren't sufficient to create decent enough slides. Unfortunately, the customer doesn't have access to the original source material, which are mostly black and white photographs from around 1900! However, he has gone back to his source to try to obtain better JPEGs. We'll see!

[Franca]

Yes - resolution is important; the businesses that create the slides should be able to provide specific information about their requirements. Perhaps Steve Rindsberg will jump in - he used to have just such a business (RDP Slides) and his slides were excellent.

[Steve Rindsberg]

Hi Jon,

As Franca mentioned, I used to be in this business. Given sufficient resolution, it's certainly possible to produce very high quality slides from JPG and other digital images.

The ideal would be a file format other than JPG, one that doesn't use lossy compression (TGA, PNG, TIFF, for example) and an image that matches the resolution of the film recorder (the gadget that converts your images to film). These are typically 2k, 4k, 8, and up (with K = 1024 in this case, so a 35mm 4k image would be 4096 x 2732 typically).

For photographic images that don't have extremely fine detail, you can get by with smaller images, 2k or even 1k, but I don't think I'd push it that far.

JPG is OK for photographic images but I'd avoid it for things with fine detail, text or the like.

[Jon Finch]

As I said in the earlier post, the client has black and white photographs that were taken around 1900 and has no access to the original material. We are therefore working from quite poor original source JPEGs and we've warned the client that the images will look very pixellated when blown up via a slide projector. However, we have warned him of all this and he is still happy to go ahead. He is giving a presentation where he will have control of the image size and will "work with what we can give him"!


Thanks for all your input.