Monday, March 7, 2011
Preserving 35mm slides or really any traditional slides which were produced years ago is one of the most difficult jobs. In order that they don't get exposed and damaged, you probably have stacked them all in a store room. However, this is really unnecessary today what with modern slide scanning services using advanced techniques to scan them into digital formats which are of high quality.
What todays' scanning services do is scan them into digital formats so that they can be stored electronically. That means they can be copied on to your computer or SD cards or anywhere you normally store all your digital files. This way, they would never be lost and maintain their present quality practically forever. Even compared to maybe a decade ago, digital scanning has come a long way.
Scanned slides can be stored in any one of the numerous digital formats by the slide scanning services such as JPEG, PNG, BMP etc. all these formats differ somewhat in their quality and resolutions. Slides scanned and converted into the JPEG format are very small in size. They are ideal if you have thousands of slides to be scanned. Keep in mind though, that the quality of picture may not be the best, although it is perfectly acceptable.
The PNG format one the other hand has a very large file size. If you only have a few slides to be converted and it is necessary to have the best quality possible, you should scan your slides into this format. If you want to convert thousands of slides into the PNG format, you would want to have large hard disks, which by the way are dirt cheap these days.
Before scanning those old slides however, you need to do a bit of work. First of all, it would be better if you sort all those slides into neatly grouped categories so that you can save them easily in separate folders to avoid confusion. Next, you would want to clean those slides as much as you can. The older the slides get the more dust they gather and some of the dust may not be easily removable.
After the best of your efforts, if some dirt specs still remain on the slides, you have help in the form of photo editing programs. You can virtually remove any kind of undesirable elements from your photos. The best of such programs are the famous Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. Inexpensive alternatives also exist such as Pixelmator for the Max as do free options such as GIMP.
One of the thoughts that might cross your mind is why not scan all those slides at home rather than spending on professional slide scanning services? If you only have a few photos and just want to carry them on your smart phone and don't need high quality, using your home scanner is a very practical choice.
However, if you want high quality images, you need professional slide scanning machines to do the job which is most often only available only with scanning services. Besides, if you have many, many slides to be scanned, doing the job at home can take days and probably will be more expensive in terms of power usage.
What todays' scanning services do is scan them into digital formats so that they can be stored electronically. That means they can be copied on to your computer or SD cards or anywhere you normally store all your digital files. This way, they would never be lost and maintain their present quality practically forever. Even compared to maybe a decade ago, digital scanning has come a long way.
Scanned slides can be stored in any one of the numerous digital formats by the slide scanning services such as JPEG, PNG, BMP etc. all these formats differ somewhat in their quality and resolutions. Slides scanned and converted into the JPEG format are very small in size. They are ideal if you have thousands of slides to be scanned. Keep in mind though, that the quality of picture may not be the best, although it is perfectly acceptable.
The PNG format one the other hand has a very large file size. If you only have a few slides to be converted and it is necessary to have the best quality possible, you should scan your slides into this format. If you want to convert thousands of slides into the PNG format, you would want to have large hard disks, which by the way are dirt cheap these days.
Before scanning those old slides however, you need to do a bit of work. First of all, it would be better if you sort all those slides into neatly grouped categories so that you can save them easily in separate folders to avoid confusion. Next, you would want to clean those slides as much as you can. The older the slides get the more dust they gather and some of the dust may not be easily removable.
After the best of your efforts, if some dirt specs still remain on the slides, you have help in the form of photo editing programs. You can virtually remove any kind of undesirable elements from your photos. The best of such programs are the famous Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. Inexpensive alternatives also exist such as Pixelmator for the Max as do free options such as GIMP.
One of the thoughts that might cross your mind is why not scan all those slides at home rather than spending on professional slide scanning services? If you only have a few photos and just want to carry them on your smart phone and don't need high quality, using your home scanner is a very practical choice.
However, if you want high quality images, you need professional slide scanning machines to do the job which is most often only available only with scanning services. Besides, if you have many, many slides to be scanned, doing the job at home can take days and probably will be more expensive in terms of power usage.
About the Author:
There are many quality online 35mm slide scanning service available, that can save you the time and heartache of doing it at home yourself. These professional companies can convert your slides to digital images.