Scanning Photos, Slides And Negatives.

[Barquentine]

Is it best to scan in a photograph or to use one of those negative/slide scanners I see advertised. Which method produces be results? Thanks

[Buenchico]

If you were to write your autobiography and submit (pre-digital) photographs to your publisher, you'd almost certainly be asked 'Are the negatives available?'. That's because the publisher would want to work directly from the material that has the most detail in it. (The details in some areas of the photograph, which were poorly exposed, might have disappeared during the printing process).

However publishers have access to top-quality negative scanners (costing thousands of pounds), plus the time to spend hours 'tweaking' a single image to get the very best results. The negative scanners which are on sale to the general public at 'everyday' prices generally don't produce as good a result as scanning from a photograph; they still produce too much 'grain' in the image. (They're vastly better than they were a decade or so ago, when most negative scanners were little more than toys and produced only very basic results, but a scan from a good-quality photograph is still likely to produce a better result).

Further, scan from photographs either get the colours right first time or require minimal tweaking to produce a good-quality image; scans from slides usually require several minutes work (per image) in Photoshop, or similar, to get the correct colour balance.

For normal home use I'd recommend normally scanning from prints where they're available. The only times that scanning negatives or slides makes most sense is when:
(a) there's no print to scan from ; or
(b) the image was either over-exposed or under-exposed, resulting in a loss of detail in the print.

My own compromise is to use a print scanner which has a built-in facility for scanning negatives and slides (so that I have it available on those fairly rare occasions that I need it).

Chris

[society]

Chris, I think you are an encyclopedia for everything. :)

[sunny-dave]

I agree with Chris - who has just saved me a whole screen of typing :)

IOU a pint Chris

Dave

[Barquentine]

Thanks Buenchico, very helpful.