Maintaining the traditional 35mm slides that were made years and even decades ago is a big ordeal for anybody. Most of those old slides of yours are probably lying in the attic inside boxes gathering dust. Maybe you don't open them up for fear of damaging them. However, modern slide scanning services are your best bet for saving those slides and maybe even making them better than before.
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.
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.
If you want very high quality images, which are as good as the original slides, you would want to go with the PNG format. The problem with PNG format images is that they occupy a lot of space, which can go into several megabytes. If you have a large enough hard disk storage, which is inexpensive these days, you can store thousands of scanned slides in this format.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you want very high quality images, which are as good as the original slides, you would want to go with the PNG format. The problem with PNG format images is that they occupy a lot of space, which can go into several megabytes. If you have a large enough hard disk storage, which is inexpensive these days, you can store thousands of scanned slides in this format.
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.
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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There are many quality online slide scanning service available, that can save you the time and heartache of doing it at home yourself. These professional companies can convert your slides to digital images.
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