Our friends over at FirstCall Photographic, located in Taunton UK, have launched a brand new Slide Scanning service around their SlideSnap Pro.

We were fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to produce the first ever multi-voltage international SlideSnap for FirstCall.

Head over to the site and check out what they’ve got to offer. -> FirstCall PhotoGraphic

(Lightroom users, consider this method)

If you are shooting as recommended, your images will have a black border around them. For some purposes this is fine, but most prefer to crop it out. You can do so manually ( in almost any imaging app ) but that will be too time consuming for a large batch of slides.

So we sought out to find the best software with automatic cropping available based on the following characteristics: Speed, accuracy / control, usability, and price. It’s been a long journey through the darkest corridors of the internet, here’s what we’ve found so you don’t have to.

• XNview / XNconvert | Free | Windows + Mac : Cross platform, and has a lot of image workflow and batch manipulation options. However, the auto crop functionality offers poor granularity, and didn’t crop consistently in our tests. A shame. The “XNview” flavor has a built in file browser, whereas “XNconvert” is more concerned with processing batches.

• Able Batch Convertor | $35 / $70 | Windows : This was a hard one. It has an amazing array of actions you can perform on your batch of images. It supports an insane number or formats, with good output options including filename sequencing. Also, the auto crop action has a tolerance option, a huge bonus. It cropped quite well in our tests. The deal breaker for us? It takes about 3 seconds per image. We need our cropping to move faster than our scanning, if you don’t, give it a try.

• AutoImager | $60 | Windows : Similar to XNconvert, somewhat less user friendly. Offers no control over auto-cropping and produced inconsistent crops.

• InstaCropper | $30 | Windows : The name says it all. This program was built with one intention, to automatically free your images of their black borders. How does it fare? Well. Very well. And it’s quick to boot, due in part to the lack of other bells and whistles. For batch processing you choose your input folder, output folder, wether or not to include subfolders, and a filename prefix or suffix. Give it a try, 15 day trial.

ImageMagick | Free | Most Platforms : Not a standalone application. This is an open source imaging library with API’s for most languages. It features a “Trim” command, which, when used in conjunction with the “blur” command, can crop quickly and accurately. If you are a software developer and require a custom setup, this is a great place to start. We built a small mac app locally, utilizing a GUI interface called Pashua for PHP (with imagick API), but it isn’t polished, or portable at all due to the somewhat complicated command line install of ImageMagick. If you own a SlideSnap and feel confident you can port our creation, feel free to contact us for a copy of the source.

Update March 6th: New challengers

Phatch: Looks promising, complicated install so a review will have to wait.

Photofiltre Studio: 

Apps we explored, but didn’t make the cut: IRFanview ( auto cropping, but it’s image by image ) , ImagingExpress (similar to IRFanview), PhotoFiltre ( batch processing but no auto crop ), FastStone Photo Resizer ( again, no auto cropping )

Bottom Line

Auto-cropping tools are slim-pickins. Just like any automated image process you’re sure to have to intervene occasionally for the best results, there is no silver bullet.

Our final recommendations are InstaCropper first, and Able Batch Convertor second. If you are using a Mac, give XNConvert a try.

We’ve also had good results batch cropping “semi-auto” in lightroom.

We intend to release a SlideSnap label application for auto-cropping and other adjustments at some point, but until then, give these apps a try.

If there are any others you are aware or can recommend, drop a line in the comments section after the jump.

We’ve put together a profile / preset for lightroom that will restore your Kodachrome scans to their proper coloring.

Download it using the link below and give it a try in your workflow. It assumes your white balance setting is Shade. If you didn’t shoot with the Shade white balance preset you may need to make your own adjustments to the preset.

Download SlideSnap Enhance for Kodachrome Shade WB.lrtemplate

If Lightroom isn’t your application of choice, refer to the attached screenshot of this preset’s sliders for an idea of how to apply similar settings in your app.

After you’ve applied your crop rectangle to all of the images, you may find that some veered off course a bit.

Lightroom lets you manually edit each image, and the quickest way to do so is as follows, starting from the first image (while in develop mode):

Cropping a slide in develop mode.

Image looks ok? Hit the right arrow key to move to the next image.
Image improperly cropped? Hit “R” adjust the crop overlay position with the arrow keys, then hit return to apply.  Hit the right arrow key to move to the next image.

Once you get the hang of this, you’ll fly through the batch in no time.

Watch on Youtube

A short tutorial on how to get rid of the black border around your scans in Lightroom. What’s that, you don’t have a black border? Well you should because bleed, out of the biological context, is a good thing.

The position of the image can shift slightly from slide to slide, so you want to ensure you capture the entire thing. And the best way to do that is to back the camera up just a tad ( You’ve got plenty of resolution to spare, don’t worry. ) so that each slide in your batch is covered.

Now, for the BEST results, you would manually crop each individual image. But realistically, if you have a lot of slides to process, the ability to batch crop is ideal. The trade-off of course being that you won’t be milking every last pixel out of each slide.

With that said, here’s the video, pardon my awful microphone.

Want to compare the images to your scanner? You can send us up to 20 slides and we’ll scan them on the SlideSnap for you to review for free. Contact us for more info.

After clicking on an image, be sure and hit “View Full Resolution” for a look at the detail.

Welcome to SlideSnapPro.com version 2, the home of worlds fastest professional slide scanning system. There is still work to be done, but along with a much cleaner look, we now accept online orders through our store.

Soon, we will have filled out our Support page with setup guides, an FAQ section, and possible community features. I’ve been meaning to add proper support resources for some time, so a quick apology to anyone who has waited.

This is an inaugural news post, really just to get a feel for the process of posting. From here on out, this will serve as a platform for information relevant to the SlideSnap Pro. As things progress in the world of photographic slide scanning, I will post my findings.

Thanks for checking us out!
-Sim