Sunday, April 10, 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.

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.

Most of the modern slide scanning services will scan your slides and convert them into one of the popular image file formats like PNG, BMP or JPEG. Others services may prefer different formats. All these formats have their own pros and cons. The JPEG images for example occupy very little digital storage space. You can copy tons of JPEG images on to your smartphones and still have storage space left. This format however isn't of the highest quality possible.

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.

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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