A good approach depends on volume, quality needs, and how much time you want to spend.

If you want to do it yourself, use a decent film/photo scanner rather than a cheap low-end model, since lower-end scanners can give poor results. Community members had good experiences with Epson photo scanners such as the V500 and V700 for slides and negatives. A practical workflow is to scan to TIFF at a reasonably high resolution, do any needed editing, then export JPEGs for sharing/storage.

If you don’t want the time investment, a reputable photo lab or scanning service can produce high-quality scans and may be the easiest option, especially for selected important slides.

Typical retouching includes:

• dust and scratch removal
• spot cleanup with healing/clone tools
• fixing color casts or faded color
• occasional watermark or blemish removal

Try to get the scan as close as possible during the scanning stage, since that reduces later work. Also decide what the scans are for before spending lots of time retouching: images you plan to print, share, or use right away are usually worth more careful cleanup than archive-only scans.