Lefty,

You are so smart in preserving your dads pictures so that future generations can
enjoy them. I would use the upmost care in the cleaning process. Never use any
water based cleaning liquid which would swell the paper mounts. Dust that is
not embedded in the emulsions can be blown away with canned air. But
fingerprints are a little tougher. If the acids in the fingerprint haven't
eaten into the emulsion layer ( or fungus formed ) what I have used is a solvent
based film cleaner solution made by EDWAL ( product code ED-AFC-4 ) on a Q-Tip.
Next, scan on a scanner with Digital ICE processing software to further restore
the images.

You should also post your question on the newsgroup;

comp.periphs.scanners

Michael....



On Tue, 18 Apr 2006 19:53:46 GMT, Lefty Bigfoot wrote:
My father recently gave me several LARGE boxes filled with
slides taken from his travels all over the globe (literally)
while in the Air Force in the 1960s. Many of them have very
interesting subjects, but they have been stored for a very long
time, and some have a lot of dust and other stuff from years of
storage plus being projected in slide trays (many, many years
ago).

I would like to scan them (most of them anyway) but need to know
about how to clean them without damaging them.

Most are Kodachrome, but a few are Ektachrome, which seem to
suffer from varying degrees of color fade and purple cast of
colors. I may wind up having to convert the Extachrome slides
to black and white in some cases. Curiously, some of the
Extachrome slides from the same time period don't seem to have
lost their color.

I'm looking at them all on a light table with a loupe right now
to avoid projecting them.

Is a cleaning brush or canned air the only way to go?

I'm wondering if there are any cleaning solutions that can be
used, if they are the same or different for Kodachrome versus
Extrachrome? Some appear to have some sort of "goo" on them,
which might be old fingerprints, or some other substance.

I was a tiny little rugrat when these were taken, and have no
experience trying to work with slides this old and in such a
potentially fragile condition. Any help much appreciated.