I plan to start scanning my old photographs (mainly of trains). I plan to scan the negatives whenever possible. Has anyone done this? If so, do you have any recommendations for a good film scanner (or any to avoid)?
I have an inexpensive single frame scanner, a Plustek Opticfilm 7200.
It does an excellent job on slides, particularly Kodachromes, but negatives seem to show up as grainy, particularly in areas of solid colour such as the sky.
It came with a rather good German program called “Silverfast” which controls the colour conversion settings for negatives which provides a number of presets for different film types.
There are better flatbed scanners these days which can scan multiple negatives at once which would be much faster. Scanning one frame at a time is S-L-O-W but it does allow individual adjustments to exposure and colour balance.
Nikon do a good line of single frame scanners which include multiple stack feeders. These can do negatives but need to be manually fed the negatives.
M636C
I did something similar to this several years ago with my parent’s family photo album, but was working mainly with photos and no negatives available. One thing I would recommend is when you get to the photo editing software, add captions to all the photos, and there’s no such thing as “too much information” in a caption. Sure, today you know the people, places, and dates of the events, but will your children and their children know this? Saving photos like this is an easy way to save and share the photo or complete album, and since they may be around for a long time, keeping the info with the photo will increase the value, if just sentimental, to future generations.
I recently got a Wolverine brand scanner for slides and 35mm film negatives, but haven’t done much work with it yet. I think it scans at around 5 Megapixels per photo. A nice compact unit that doesn’t need to be hooked up to a computer while you do the scanning. It has a wall wart power supply and saves the scans on an SD card. I use Photoshop Elements for the editing and caption adding.
I had good luck scanning slides and negatives with a OneTouch 9220. Unfortunately they don’t support Vista, which came on my most recent computer. I now have an HP Scanjet G4050 but haven’t done any slides or negatives with it yet. It will scan an insane DPI (4800), which will probably really bring out any graininess in an exposure, but which capability is good for turning 35mm slides and negatives into posters…
Scanning that finely takes forever, however, and generates huge files. As a test, I just scanned just my daughter (in green) from the waist up from this standard 4x6 print at 2400 and the file came in at 16 meg…
The full print was scanned at 200 DPI.
The slide carrier will hold up to 16 slides, and the negative carrier will hold up to 5 strips, good for bulk scans.
A plus I was looking for this time was the PDF capability this one has.
Since you’re doing ‘archival’ work, I’d definitely invest in a good editing program.
Charles Freericks/ Erie Lackawanna / http://cs.trains.com/trccs/members/Erie-Lackawanna.aspx has done quite a bit of this on here with images from his father’s collection from the 1940’s - 1970’s. If he doesn’t show up with a comment here, I suggest sending him a PM/ e-mail as well.
- Paul North.
One suggestion I’ll offer is that you pick your “saved to” image format wisely.
.jpg is one of the more popular, but it is a "lossy’ format meaning that each edition saved will be slightly less quality than the one before it. so if you saved your scans into a .jpg format, then subsequent copies that you might edit later will start to show the cumulative effect of the .jpg compression.
Better if you save your first generation into a .png or .bmp format. the file sizes will be larger, but at least you will be starting with quality images
Or
Or I can jump in…
I use a Dimage Scan Dual III. It’s no longer made (nor is the updated version, the Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV), but I would recommend either one of them very highly, if you can find one.
I know of a couple of folk who have bought used ones on eBay based on my recommendation and they have been very happy, and as I’m typing this, I’m in fact scanning some slides on mine (these happen to be slides I just shot in December, but it works just as well with them).
What I love about this machine is that it is dedicated to film and slides and scans through them, rather putting them flat against a piece of glass. That extra depth really seems to make the images pop.
This is the type of thing that the expensive Nikon scanners also do, but we are talking about a few hundred dollars instead for a used Dimage.
You will also need a flatbed scanner for prints that you don’t have negatives of, and the scanner only works with 35MM, so if your negatives are 120, 220, 127, and other, I’ve just wasted a lot of your time.
If you have a lot of those, I am not sure what the answer is. You might be better off scanning the prints.
A couple more thoughts…
-
The old software on the Dimage scanners won’t work with Vista or Windows 7, so you need a Windows XP or older machine (or someone who’s smart enough to figure out a way to make a Dimage run on ICE, which I think is possible, but I don’t know how to do it.
-
Save in TIFF (to quote from above). Always keep a copy of the original scan.
-
Do not sharpen or over correct the original scan. Do this when you edit. (See point 2).
-
Realize this is a very long journey. Don’t get frustrated that it will take a long time to scan lots of stuff.
-
Save BIG. Scan BIG. Always adjust to the largest scan size.
Thanks for the replies.
I have just last year finished scanning my total film output from the 1960’s and 70’s using the Plustek 7200 scanner and I am more than pleased with the results. As the slides particularly were deteriorating fast I concentrated on getting them digitized first rather than cleaning the images as I went. I used the excellent Silverfast software to make rough adjustments first and I am now going through cleaning up each picture with a photo editing program. You can adjust the quality setting as you scan but if you use the finest setting it produces ginormous files. I chose a slightly above mid range setting which produced 20-30 meg TIFF files which I have found to be more than adequate for reproduction. It is important to clean each slide thoroughly before coping as it saves a lot of post scan clean up work. I have also satisfactorily scanned my B & W negs to the computer. Also have done colour negs with less success producing only fair results. Note the Plustek scanner will only handle 35mm film stock. I cannot stress strongly enough to backups of your scans. I lost about 12 months work when my hard drive died. Because there are a lot of large files involved an external hard drive is probably the way to go.
Does the quality of the scans deteriorate over time? If so, what is the “next step”?
Ed
The scans are electronic information, so they don’t deteriorate, and in fact, perfect, exact copies can be knocked off however many times you like.
What you have to be careful of is that the medium you store them in will deteriorate. CDs and DVDs have a shelf life of 5 to 10 years. Hard drives probably don’t even last that long, but are actually better, because transferring data from one to another is very easy.
There are archival DVDs with long life (over 100 years), but I’m not sure what the value is, because I am not convinced there will be DVD players/readers 100 years from now.
I think it’s better to have a couple hard drives, backing one up with the other (and keeping one in another location).
Eventually, backing up will go to our own personal data clouds and all of our electronic information will be available anywhere we log onto a computer (and these clouds will be backed up in multiple locations)
Once the scan is saved to the hard drive, the main thing to worry about is “magnetic migration” where the magnetic norths and magnetic souths on the actual disk platters tend to attract one another, and negate each other over time.
Newer disks, with their higher data densities are actually at greater risk for data loss through this means than are the older ones. I’ve seen older, cruder 8" floppies that still have data from 1980, but those tracks on the disk are really spaced far apart compared to today’s high density units.
Most people I’ve talked with claim that data sitting on an unused hard drive is safe 30-50 years before magnetic migration becomes a real problem.
So, an external USB hard drive that you keep in your spare closet when not actually being used to save pictures to, will likely last you the rest of your normal life.
I have scanned hundreds of photos and slides with my Canoscan 8400F. It can do 4 slides at a time, and they provide a nice template to hold the slides in place.
Any of the Canons are super machines: 5600F, 8800F. All available at newegg.com, among others.
You didn’t mention what size the negatives are.
35mm slide and negative scanners are pretty cheap and available many places. For larger negatives you will need a flatbed which has the disadvantage of scanning through glass, or some pretty expensive professional quality scanners.
What if one was not normal to begin with?
Thanks for the replies. All of the negatives are 35mm. The vast majority are color with just a few black & white.
Charles,
Good info in all your post ! Thanks a bunch…
I recently purchased an Epson Perfection V500 Photo Color Scanner. It’s a flatbed scanner, 8.5"x11" glass for scanning documents, B&W or color photos. Also, comes with 2 film holders. One accommodates four 35mm slides and two 35mm negative film strips (up to 6 frames per strip) and the other holder is for medium format film (6x6 or 6x9cm/2.25"x2.25" or 2.25"x3.25"). Color correcting software is included. It has exceeded my expectations and pretty easy to use. It will with work with PC or Mac (I have a Mac). Yes, it does take time. But, it’s quicker than making prints in a darkroom. If you are only doing 35mm slides, look at a slide scanner. A good one is more $, but you will get better results. Check out the reviews at Amazon.com