Let us simplify matters straight away and refer to negatives & slides from here on in as what they are i.e. film, the difference being that a negative is an image with light and shade and/or colours  reversed on a piece of film whereas a transparency or slide is a positive because it has the colours the right way round.

You will get better results from film than from all those old prints you have, even if it is more difficult to scan it well. Why? Well you’ve looked at those prints a sight more often than the negatives and slides now haven’t you? You’ve thumbed through them with family on many occasion and slipped them in your wallet to share with friends, after all that’s what they for. And you’ve left them lying around on the coffee table or stuck them in a drawer, because that’s what people do. Whereas the chances are the negs are in their original sleeves having never been disturbed and your slides, mounted in glass like mine, to protect them? Shame, I have found my unmounted slides have fared better. But at least they aren’t suffering from the inevitable thumb prints or fading and scratches and creases and -what is that? that the prints seem to pick up. Be that as it may, one way or another we have loads of film we want to integrate with our digital pics. Research has shown that a typical happy snapper has as many as three thousand  images, so what to do?

If you fancy fixing it for yourself have a think on this:
The up front costs (assuming you already have the PC) are going to be for a scanner which will cost from around £500. You can pay  lots more and of course you buy for less but basically (quality wise) you will get what you pay for. You will also need image correction software. Some will come with the scanner but similarly best results come with a dedicated program like Adobe Photoshop, a cut down version of which will add around £80; and some software even if it is free, you are better leaving well alone as I will explain later. Then you are going to need lots of time: Cleaning your scanner continually while you are at it and more important each individual negative or slide, which unless your scanner is expensive will also have to be unmounted as well -let’s allow say 1 minute for that. With the know how, scanning the image at the suitable resolution will take say 4 mins. And if it’s more than a few years old correcting fading, colour shift, scratches, sharpening, cropping etc. at least 5 minutes. Total around 10 minutes each! Now you know how many bits of film you have so you can work it out for yourself. But if it’s half the average you are going to need to be dedicated and have something like eight months of free Saturdays to do it. So digitizing negatives and slides could easily take an typical photographer six weeks of forty hours or more, and that takes no account of the formatting and filing, the odd jams and crashes that do happen, or coffee breaks and so on. If you have more or less photos than the average guy then the time will be pro rata. And that’s just the start. No time allowance has been made for editing the pics which can be anything from minimal to considerable. Still as keen? Right let’s get to it.

Why are you scanning them? To back up your film versions? To enhance or enlarge them? To repair and print them out? To create a slide show or send them to friends? Because the answers to all the foregoing and what comes hereafter will help you choose the equipment that is right for you. Two things to bear in mind when you are looking at scanners are, that manufacturers proffer resolutions beyond a scanner’s real capability because it sounds good, and then they make up the difference by, for want of a better term, jiggery-pokery (interpolation); and the other is that to the human eye 300 pixels are as good as it gets.

At one end of the market there is the £50 ShotCopy which copies your film by way of your still or video camera and at the other professional scanners costing many thousands. I haven’t tried the ShotCopy but I would guess being an open framed, one at a time type device, it would be fiddly, more susceptible to fingerprints and dust than other systems; and wearisome. Flat bed scanners are really intended for scanning prints but some do have add on bits of hardware for scanning negatives and slides which involves a lot more tinkering and calibration and such, and that’s all before you can even start. A dedicated film scanner is much better at the job. Cheap ones are now appearing but if you are serious about this you will be looking for something better and costing more accordingly. Probably about £500 plus but these make for the best final images and do it quicker too. Narrowing your choice even more is the fact that only a few of them like the Nikon have optional(?) film and slide feeders, which mean you can leave them to crack on with the boring bit while you have fun. The feeder is little different to the slide magazine you used with your projector, but boy do they make you pay for it. By about ten times! On top of the scanner! But let’s face it if you have sufficient slides or negatives for you to consider a film scanner, then you have little choice other than to buy the feeder as well. You might worry about the price if you only had a dozen or so to do, but hardly if you have a thousand or more. The trouble is, feeders can be prone to jamming.

Lower priced scanners may include basic image editing software where as the better the scanner the more likely it is to come with an clever bit of software called ICE which automatically adjusts exposure, contrast, colour, reduces grain, gets rid of dust and scratches. But this sort of program works by reducing the sharpness of the image, by blurring it. Better by far to check the films by eye and if necessary clean it with compressed air (don’t blow on it your breath is too moist) and/or wipe it gently with a lint free cloth. Anything left can be dealt with specifically with the image editing program. Your shots will be all the sharper for it. You can take advantage of your scanners resolution range. Film can store much more information than prints and scans at 2000-3000 dpi can reveals things that previously went unnoticed, but also be aware that the higher the resolution, the more defects are likely to show up. And that typically a resolution as low as 72 dpi is fine on screen for shots you just want to look at, as is 600 dpi if you want to retain the option of enlargement at another time.  Or that is the common orthodoxy.

The Big Lie about DPI 
I have just been reading a computer magazine that recommends 72 dots per inch (dpi) for digital images intended for websites, 150 for archiving purposes, 300 for printing, 600 for enlarging and 2,400 for slide scanning; and most cameras take pictures at around 240! You would think the industry would have got it together wouldn’t you? Well it has but as you can see it certainly hasn’t with DPI.

Take these three images. From left to right, the first is at a mere 7 dpi, yes just seven. The second is at 72 dpi and the last? 720 dots per inch. And yet they all look identical. If you don’t believe it, right click on each image in turn and select Save picture as to down load them on to your hard drive to check the number of dots per inch of each for yourselves. They will still look the same on your monitor (because pixel-wise they are) but in whatever you use to edit photos the image properties of each will reveal that the dpi are different and exactly as indicated here. How come then they all look the same? Because the pixel dimensions are the same, and that’s what matters for video, whether it’s your monitor, TV, digital frame or phone. They don’t know anything about imperial or metric or dpi, just pixels. And done this way, the un-compressed files are all the same size too. This helps to explain why sometimes a picture you include in an e-mail turns out to be ridiculously big or stupidly small, even when it was reduced to this arbitrary 72 dpi that so many people swear by. It’s why only part of your picture appears on the screen or why it is so small that you can hardly make it out, even with your specs. The problem arises because it wasn’t measured in pixels. DPI are irrelevant right up to the point you want to get physical and print. Until then give pixels the priority (you’ll get used to them very quickly) and only resort to dpi when you need to.

Which Format?
If you don’t want to play with your images in an photo editor you could use the JPEG file format which only requires a tenth of the space a Tiff file does, but if you do want to tweak your images, I would recommend the Tiff file format because whilst it requires a lot more disk space, it retains the quality of your images no matter how often you edit them. Jpegs files are going to be around 3 to 5 megabytes in size so you can work out from that how much unused hard disk space you are going to need in either format based on the number pictures you actually have. Divide the megabytes by 1000 and you have a pretty good idea how many gigabytes of Hard Disk space you are going to need. However, if you intend sending your photos to others on disk, or by e-mail, or by putting them on the web, you are going to have to reformat and resize your picture files to screen size images, which means you are going to need even more space. Now double that, because you are going to want to keep you digital pictures safe aren’t you?

And what about you?
If you are going to invest all this time and money in doing the scanning you need to make sure you have the ability to repair and enhance your scanned images well, correct any colour shift and fading etc. Or you need to have access to someone with that knowledge or follow-up service that can take the image files you scanned & do it for you. Well you are OK here, aren’t you? Because either way you have.

Footnote: You can use a scanner a bit like a camera and scan 3D objects. Just remember that the depth of focus is only about 1-2 cm and the colour and detail will be really good. It could give you a creative edge when you want a title slide or page. You can scan all sorts of things, beads, flowers, insects -no don’t let’s go there. This 3D sculptured picture frame was just laid on the glass to scan. It was then turned it into a template so that it can be used with any picture; and text to create a title page or title slide.

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