Image Requirements for 35mm color slides

35mm color slides printed from digital images

Details on your color slides:

  • Industry standard 2×2 inch slides for decades.
  • Fit in Kodak Carousel Trays holding 80 or 140 slides, plus other brands of 35mm slide trays.
  • We use Fuji Velvia 100 film.
  • Printed at 2732×4096 pixels (7.33×11 inches) at 372 dpi to a film recorder.
  • Processed at a Kodak certified pro lab for consistency. We do not process film in-house.
  • Mounted in plain plastic slide mounts with white on both sides.
  • No numbers, dates or logos are used on the slide mounts.
  • The space for your image is the pixel dimensions mentioned above. If your image measures less pixels, it will automatically be printed to fit as large as possible within the viewing area of the slide and any remaining space will be filled with black.
  • Your slides are shipped back to you in clear plastic slide pages.

Image file requirements:

  • Do not rotate vertical images to lay on their side.  Those will misprint, so keep them as verticals.
  • Film Recorder page size: 2732×4096 pixels or 7.33×11 inches at 372 DPI. Files this size will result in the best slides you can produce.
  • 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.
  • Minimum file size: 900×600 pixels at 72 DPI. Smaller images may show the pixels and result in blurry slides.
  • 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.
  • For artwork, we print your images at 95% of their possible size to minimize any cropping and any remaining space will be automatically filled with black. 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.
  • Apple Mac Users Please Note:  Macs have a monitor Gamma of 1.8 and our Windows PCs have a monitor Gamma of 2.2. That means your images appear brighter than they really are on your Mac and your images will look dark here.  They’ll also print dark. To fix this, view your images on a Windows machine and make them brighter by 1/2 to 1 f-stop.

By George

I earned a BA in Photography from The Ohio State University and I've been producing slides with film recorders since 1996 when a 14.4 baud phone modem was "high speed Internet!" I've also scanned slides and negatives since then. Slides are my life!