Saturday 19 March 2011

Why Use Modern Slide Scanning Services

By Jennifer Hoskins


If you have had to maintain old slides whether they were the 35mm variety of others, you know how big a problem it can be. In order to save them from any exposure, you probably have stored them in the attic and even forgotten about them. however, using modern slide scanning services, you can really get all those slides back in top shape and make them even better looking.

When you hand your slides over to a scanning service, it is scanned and stored in one of the digital formats. Once this is done, they can be stored anywhere digitally. That can be on your PC or Mac or even thumb drives, where they will be safe and never deteriorate. Scanning technology has come a long way over the past few years and especially over the past 10 years.

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 is an uncompressed image file format which preserves the quality of your slide and reproduces exactly the same image. If you want to archive photos on to a large hard disk, this is the better choice. That is because the PNG files occupy a large amount of space as compared to the other formats. This shouldn't be a problem since Terabyte storage disks are much cheaper 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.

You might think that it would be better and cheaper to scan your old slides using the scanner that you use at home instead of hiring slide scanning services. This may well be a better choice. If you have very few slides and you don't need very high quality photos, scanning at home will indeed be cheaper.

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.




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