Digitizing Slides & Negatives?

angiekey

angiekey

Sweet Shoppe SugarBabe
Hello, all - do you have any experience with digitizing photographs from slides and/or negatives?

I've been given boxes and boxes of unsorted slides and negatives spanning about the first ten years of my life. I'm struggling to find the best way to digitize these images so I can work with them.

If you've got any experience with this, I could use your advice!
 
I have sent them away to be scanned in, and I have also scanned them in myself. It was pretty expensive to have someone else do them, and I didn't feel like I had the control over image processing that I wanted. But it was easy! I have an Epson Perfection V600 photo scanner, and it came with a tray to scan in negatives and slides. It takes FOREVER. However, once I figured out my workflow, I was able to get many many done. I thought it was worth having my own machine, but it is lots of work. It does a great job with paper photos, too.
 
I've done the same as allyanne. I sent a bunch of negatives out to a company maybe 10 years ago. They came back with a green tint to about 90% of them (so much for quality control). I then sent the same negatives to a different company. Those were much better even though I knew quite a few of the photos were backwards (easy to tell on some that had words in the photo) but those were easy enough for me to correct in PSP. The 2nd company was ScanDigital and I sent my stuff to Indianapolis. Turnaround time was pretty good.

Before I did that, I had a small photo scanner that I spent a weekend scanning photos when I was at a retreat. Not the best quality since that was probably 16 to 18 years ago.

Then after I retired I bought a film scanner (Zonoz FS-FIVE) from Amazon to do more of my negatives. It had trays for different sizes of film that I needed.
 
I’ve done both, sent away at Walmart years ago, probably 15 years now, and when I was getting my degree in photography, we had a negative scanner and I scanned all the other ones during lab hours.

It worked pretty well.


I have a ton of the old advantix (sp) cylinders I need to scan, but I think I need a special scanner for that.
 
nesser1981 said:
I have a ton of the old advantix (sp) cylinders I need to scan, but I think I need a special scanner for that.
Click to expand...

I have 1 of those that I don't even remember what was on it so would like it scanned. The one place I used to send a lot of negatives still doesn't do Advantix. But I just found that a company called Scan Cafe does. Cost is $0.48 per image and $10.00 for a digital download. When placing the order a UPS shipping label is created. I don't know who pays that cost.

Scan Cafe is actually located in Indiana, so not far from me.
 
For me, I wanted the photos and I wasn't worried about the quality being amazing. I knew quite a few of the negatives had been exposed to too much heat and such, so they weren't great and I didn't want to pay for crappy images. Plus, most of them were taken by me at 10-13 and I hated using a flash (still do, but didn't understand light and such back then).

So, long story short, this too-poor-to-pay-a-lot girl bought a little scanner. I scanned all the negatives and slides. The one I bought is not the highest quality. But it works for me. It was a big project since my scanner basically took a photo of each negative image, so I had to scan each one, line it up and then press the button. They are not large files, but they work for my needs. I originally set aside some of the better quality negatives to send in for more professional scanning, but decided I was okay with what I have. I watched a lot of television while I worked on it. I still need to organize them, but my negatives were unorganized so it wasn't easy to organize while I scanned.

These two pages were made with the scans. You can see the photos aren't amazing, but then again, neither was my camera or my parent's camera back then. I'd rather have the imperfect photos, so I'm cool with it.



 
nesser1981 said:
I have a ton of the old advantix (sp) cylinders I need to scan, but I think I need a special scanner for that.
Click to expand...

I bought a scanner that would do advantix. I had to pull the negatives out of the advantix containers to do it. The problem with them is panaromic photos. They are hard to scan right! Luckily photoshop will stitch them together.

The other problem is their size. I had the same problem with my 110 camera negatives.
 
You are all AWESOME - thank you so much for sharing your experience and wisdom!

I own a flatbed scanner that came with trays to do negatives and slides, but I've since misplaced the trays and can't find them online to order replacements. I bought an Epson FF-680W FastFoto scanner to quickly scan stacks of photo prints, and it works like a dream... but that left me with the issue of the slides and negatives.

I bought a Kodak Slide N Scan digital film scanner last year, and while it's easy to use and I can kind of get into a rhythm of loading and scanning the slides, the resulting images aren't the best. I can't tell if my father had chronic issues with the focus on his camera, or if the scanner I'm using is the issue.

Now I've got my eye on the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i SE, which would definitely give me the quality of scans I want, but I'm trying to decide if it's worth dropping another $400 on a scanner.

Courtney, you've got a great attitude about the images - even if they're not the best, you can print them smaller and see them (and by the way, those layouts are beautiful!) and yeah, cameras weren't necessarily the best back then.

Oy. You've all given me a lot to think about...
 
angiekey said:
I bought a Kodak Slide N Scan digital film scanner last year, and while it's easy to use and I can kind of get into a rhythm of loading and scanning the slides, the resulting images aren't the best. I can't tell if my father had chronic issues with the focus on his camera, or if the scanner I'm using is the issue.
Click to expand...

Like Courtney said, not all of my scans either of photos or negatives are the greatest. Even some of the negatives I sent out to be scanned are either out of focus or blurry. IMO, that's just what happened when using film cameras all those years ago. You didn't know if the photos were good until the film was developed. Can't tell you how many photos I've had over the years that ended up blurry or out of focus.

Thankfully with the help of graphics software, some of the issues can be corrected on those photos these days. Or I embrace them especially if they are a special memory that there are no other photos.
 
I use the kodak slide and scanner like you mentioned. I don't mind the quality though I do use the "auto tone" feature in ps to fix them up some.
 
Scanning in negatives, slides & photos is one of my high-priority projects.

I've scanned negatives several ways but I've used my Epson V600 flatbed scanner the most. It's time consuming to get a large image so I scrap or work on other things while the scanner is working its magic.

My youngest son has a larger-scale (pricey) negative scanner that I've used as well. It worked great but then I had to convert those negatives using Lightroom which just added an extra step.

I scanned a bunch of negatives using a small, much less expensive, negative scanner, and unfortunately the end result was not great.

My next step is changing the metadata on all of the negatives I've scanned so that the month/year are correct.
 
allyanne said:
I have sent them away to be scanned in, and I have also scanned them in myself. It was pretty expensive to have someone else do them, and I didn't feel like I had the control over image processing that I wanted. But it was easy! I have an Epson Perfection V600 photo scanner, and it came with a tray to scan in negatives and slides. It takes FOREVER. However, once I figured out my workflow, I was able to get many many done. I thought it was worth having my own machine, but it is lots of work. It does a great job with paper photos, too.
Click to expand...

I love my Epson V600! It does take forever but I feel like it's worth it!
 
I have the Epson V600 scanner as well. Takes forever and you need to be able to be doing something else a the same time. My back doesn't like sitting there doing that stuff so I doing quite small batches when I do scan. I have thought of sending my negatives off to get scanned but the idea that they could get lost somewhere along the route very much prevents me.

Maybe we could train and hire students to do the work and pay them hourly?! LOL
 
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