Scanning 1950s slides

My mother-in-law did the classic Kiwi/Australian pilgrimage over to London in the late 1950s.

In those days you got to England by boat, which took weeks but stopped at fabulous places along the way - such as Sydney-Melbourne-Singapore-Penang-Colombo-Bombay-Aden-PortSaid-Malta-Naples-Marseilles-Barcelona-Gibraltar-Lisbon-Le Havre-Southampton. (That's got to beat 24 hours in economy class on a plane).

When she moved out of the family home she uncovered a huge box of slides which she said she was planning to throw out. So they took up residence in our attic instead. For her birthday earlier this year, The Husband scanned a sample of the slides:


Then I am using the "Life in Pictures No.02" photobook templates from Designer Digitals to scrap an album for her, using (apart from a couple of exceptions) one photo per page


Here's the trip over to Europe on the P & O ocean liner:


To scan the slides we used a very high resolution (beware that the default may be set to 72 dpi, when you need it to be much higher). In photoshop I cleaned them up a little using the clone and spot healing tools (but not too much). I brightened them using the brightness/contrast sliders and if necessary sharpened them using smart sharpen.
On a few of them I used my favourite trick of adding a colour overlay, then erasing part of it away with a soft brush. (Simply duplicate your photo layer, add a colour overlay layer and experiment with different blend modes and opacities. Erase away parts - eg the centre of the photo or one side - if you wish)