Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Advantages of Modern Slide Scanning Services

By Jennifer Hoskins


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.

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.

When slide scanning services scan your slides, they usually convert them into image file formats. These can be JPEG, PNG, BMP or anything which is suitable. There are small differences between these formats. For instance, images, stored in the JPEG format are small in size and you can easily fit thousands of them in a small SD card, albeit with somewhat lower quality.

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.

If you have decided to finally scan those slides of yours, you just need to do some preparation. The first job would be to group the slides into neat categories so that they are easy to scan and store in their own folders. Secondly, make sure that the slides are as clean as possible. Old slides that have been stored away for years may have gathered a lot of dust and may have attracted some stains.

If you find that some slides cannot be cleaned completely, don't worry just yet. Today, there is a wide variety of photo editing software available on the internet. Using these, you can manipulate photos as to hide the dirty specs and make your photos look clean. Some of the more popular image editing programs includes Adobe's Photoshop and Corel's Paint Shop Pro. You can also try the free 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.

If you want to be sure that your slides are scanned into the best possible photos, handing the job over to a professional scanning service is better. Firstly, they are more likely to have high end professional equipment which is much better than the average scanner. Secondly, it will turn out to be much cheaper to have them scan for you.




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