How to produce 35mm color slides from your digital images

Imagine your digital camera images printed into beautiful 35mm color slides! Preserve your memories forever before your hard drive fails.

How to produce the best 35mm color slides from your digital image files...

The first thing you need to do is to set your monitor up the best you can. Each monitor displays color differently and there's no universal standard. No color profiles exist for film recorders, so try this simple calibration technique.

Set the color temperature of your monitor to show the whitest white with no color casts. For images the normal setting is 6500 degrees K, so set it to that.
Set the brightness and contrast so you see white whites and black blacks.
Look at your images and color correct them if necessary.
This will give you a good starting point so your images will look real close to this on the printed slides. The 35mm slides will show a little more color saturation and a little more contrast because film can show more colors than monitors can reproduce.
Macintosh users please note: Your monitor gamma must be checked. Macintosh uses a monitor gamma of 1.8 and Windows monitor gamma is 2.2, which means your Macintosh monitor is brighter. Your images will look good on your monitor and they will be too dark on our monitor. Unfortunately, your slides will print too dark as well. Please view your images with a monitor gamma of 2.2 or view them on a Windows machine and correct them before sending us your images.
Image file requirements:

Minimum file size: 900x600 pixels at 72 DPI. Smaller images may show the pixels and result in blurry slides.
If you're shooting with your digital camera, then set it to shoot at the highest quality/largest file size and then leave them at that size. If you try to size them up with software, that does not improve the slides, it only creates larger files to send to us.
Film Recorder page size: 2732x4096 pixels or 7.33x11 inches at 372 DPI. Files this size will result in the best slides you can produce. Many clients create large files like this and they ship the files to us on a CD if they don't have a broadband Internet connection for uploading to us.
Any file within those two extremes will produce sharp slides, but larger images with more pixels are the sharpest.
Use RGB Color Mode instead of CMYK Mode since we're not printing to paper with ink.
For TIF files use IBM PC byte order and LZW compression.
For JPG files, do all of your manipulation in some other file format (TIF, PSD, etc.) and then do one final save using the maximum quality/minimal compression setting. This will produce the largest file with the minimum compression and it will eliminate the JPG "lossy" effect. Multiple saves in the JPG format create the lossy effect.
Your images will be printed so your entire image fits in the 35mm rectangle. This is the default setting. We print your images at 95% of their possible size to minimize any cropping and any remaining space will be automatically filled with black. If you'd rather have a white fill (clear film) then let us know in the comment box when you place your order. DISCLAIMER: The clear film around your image is not recommended because the full glare of the projector bulb will shine around your image/text and that glare will dilute the colors of your art/subject matter. All images look better with the black fill because black projects as no light on the screen, making your image/art appear alone on the screen.
We can also print them with automatic cropping that makes your image fill the 35mm rectangle entirely. On a horizontal image this setting will crop the top and bottom until the left and right sides fit in the 35mm rectangle. Let us know if you want this by using the comment box when you place your order.
Our preferred file formats are JPG and TIF, but we can also print these files:

Postscript (*.ps, *.prn, *.cps, *.eps) Not preferred.

Adobe PDF (*.pdf) Make sure your background is not transparent.

JPG (*.jpeg, *.jff, *.jtf) Preferred.

TIF (*.tiff) Preferred.

Targa (*.tga, *.rnd) Rarely seen.

Kodak FlashPix (*.fpx) Rarely seen.

PCX (*.pcx) Rarely seen.

GIF (*.gif) Limited to 256 colors.

SGI graphics format (*.sgi) Never seen it.

Photo CD (*.pcd) Rarely seen.

CALS (*.cal) Never seen it.

SUN Raster (*.ras) Never seen it.

Windows & OS/2 Bitmap (*.bmp) Preferred.

Photoshop (*.psd) Layers do not print, so do one final save as a JPG or TIF
Portable Network Graphics (*.png) Preferred.

Please name your files with something that helps us separate yours from others, i.e. your-last-name01.jpg, etc. Mac Users please note: We need the dot and 3 letter file name extension so the computers know what type of file to print.
Thank you for sending us the work!

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