Making 35mm Slides with WinRascol

Jo Wozniak

ITG Staff Member

A short introduction on how to make 35mm slides from digital images using WinRascol and the Lasergraphics Film Recorder. (LFR).

Prerequisites

You will need the following things before you can make slides:

• 35mm film. Kodak Ektachrome 100 ASA film is recommended for making color slides. Kodak technical pan (ESTAR-AH Base) film is recommended for B&W prints (available in film stores, not drug stores). We do not recommend use of Polarchrome film or any film that is not 100 ASA.
• A set of images with bitmaps and/or objects. WinRascol accepts BLL, HPGL, LL, Photoshop PSD, TARGA, TIFF, DICOM, JPG, BMP and PCX.
• Sufficient time on the LFR pc to create all of your slides. Higher resolution images can take about six minutes per image to render to film.

Directions

When creating 35mm slides from digital images using the LFR the most foolproof way for the images to be processed correctly is to use WinRascol.  If you want to do so, you can choose the LFR to be the printer from an application but sometimes the image gets scaled down or half or none of the image gets processed.  We have done some testing and communicated with Lasergraphics and they fully recommend always using WinRascol to queue up the images.

Please remember to sign out the computer hosting the LFR on the VMIL calendar pages so your work will not be interrupted by another user.

First turn on the LFR, as it needs about fifteen minutes to warm up. Once the green light has stopped blinking, it should be ready. Load film as you would in a normal camera. The LFR will automatically advance the film to the correct location. If you leave the room while your slides are rendering, place the "In Use" sign on the keyboard so people know not to disturb your slide-making. And be sure to turn off the LFR when you are finished, as leaving it on for extended periods of time may cause damage.

Creating an Image Queue with WinRascol

•  Choose WinRascol from the Start menu. You will use WinRascol to make a queue of images that will be sent to the LFR.
  
• The WinRascl queue should open. If it does not, then you can open it with New Queue under the File menu.
• Use the Add  option in the Job menu to add images to the queue. Delete removes the highlighted image from the queue.  Once the file is in the queue it will be automatically processed with the setting you see displayed unless you go to Job->Stop Queue.  Once you have stopped the queue you can go and change the setting for each or all of the images you have in the queue.  When you are ready to start processing go to Job->Start Queue.
  
• To see other fields in for the image in the queue window, go to the View menu
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• Double clicking on any field (Resolution, Film type, etc) brings up a window to change options.  When in the Film and Resolution option window make sure the film type is set correctly as the coloring does change among different types.  This is also where you set the LFR processing resolution and copy count. 

  

  In the miscelaneous job options menu check the scale factor (optimal is 93%, see below), change the background color a different color than black is desired and the other options should be set as default.

   

   

  In the color balance and gamma correction job option window all settings should be set at default.

  

   

  In the HPGL Job options window all settings should also stay at the defaulted values.

   

  
  

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• Things to know when preparing your slides for the LFR:

  Image Size - 35mm slides are 36mm x 24mm, or a 3x2 aspect ratio.  All images intended for 35mm film should be created or cropped to fit on a 3x2 aspect ratio.  So if you have a square image, the sides will be filled in with the background color (black is default) or the top and bottom will be chopped off, depending on the options set in WinRascol

  Resolution - If you intend to use the 4k resolution capability of the LFR, the ideal pixel dimensions should be 4096 (width)x2731(height) for 35mm film if you want to shoot at 4k.  if you have these dimensions, each image should be roughly 32MB.  To keep file size smaller, usually 150dpi for a 3"x2" image is good enough, but reducing to 72dpi produces very pixelated slides.   WinRascol will intelligently discard excess pixels if there are too many in the image but has to replicate pixels if there are too few pixels in the image. 

  Alternatively, you can determine what the resolution would be if you want to utilize the 8k capability of the LFR.    There are 3 "standard" page sizes.  The usual standard is 11"x7.33 (height x width).  Microsoft has its own standard at 11.25"x7.5".  Macs have another "standard" at 12"x8".  What you would need to do is divide the output resolution by the page size.  Resolutions are 2048x1365 for 2k, 4096x2731 for 4k and 8192x5461 for 8k.  So if you want to shoot at 8k then 8192/11 = 744 pixels/inch.  If you want to use the "fast" 2k mode on the LFR, divide the page size by 2048.

   WinRascol is extremely good with native Photoshop files (.psd) (make sure they are 8-bit).  Also, layered Photoshop files process without a problem. 

  Powerpoint files should be saved as a series of either JPG or TIF files and then brought into WinRascol for best results.  

• Again, you can choose to shoot slides without queueing them in WinRascol and instead setting the LFR as the printer from the application you used to create the images but this has been randomly problematic for some people. 
• Scaling - reducing the scaling factor to 93% is usually recommended to ensure that no text near the borders is cut off by the mounting process.
• Don't forget to turn off the LFR when you are done.

Imaging Technology Group
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
405 N. Mathews, Urbana, IL 61801

Date Issued: 21 March 2000

Copyright © 1996, Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, All Rights Reserved.