3/25/2011

Why Use Modern Slide Scanning Services

By Jennifer Hoskins


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.

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.

Scanned slides can be stored in any one of the numerous digital formats by the slide scanning services such as JPEG, PNG, BMP etc. all these formats differ somewhat in their quality and resolutions. Slides scanned and converted into the JPEG format are very small in size. They are ideal if you have thousands of slides to be scanned. Keep in mind though, that the quality of picture may not be the best, although it is perfectly acceptable.

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.

However, scanning services usually have high end, professional grade scanners. Moreover, if you have hundreds of slides, it is very time consuming and expensive to do the job at home. Hiring these services becomes the wiser choice in that case.




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