Best Practices for Scanning Slides, Negatives and Old Prints

Hey folks. This topic comes to me as a request from a subscriber. The photographer asking has a lot of slides that need to be scanned to be converted to digital files. I will also look at dealing with negatives for colour and black and white.

Equipment

You can spend a fortune on a film scanner. You do not need to do so. A good quality flatbed scanner will do an excellent job. While there are many options, a proven choice is the Epson V600. It does negatives and positives in 35mm and 120 formats. It has an optical resolution of 6400 dots per inch and includes frames for 35mm negatives, 35mm sliders and 2 frames of 120. Built into the device is the respected Digital ICE capability which corrects for dust marks and scratches. It sells retail for about $300 USD and $350 CAD. It connects to your computer via USB and includes Epson Scan software which is quite good.

Time

Scanning negatives or slides is not a fast thing and there is a lot of handling of the media and selection work to get things done. As long as you plan for this being time consuming and not particularly exciting work, you will be fine. If time is a consideration there are many commercial scanning offerings, but given the irreplaceability of your original media, the thought of mailing or couriering the media makes me nervous particularly as so many of these services are in Southeast Asia.

Software

Your computer operating system has some native scanner support, but I am going to suggest that it is not adequate for scanning negatives or slides or even old printed photos. You can often scan directly into your image editor such as Photoshop, but my experience with this is that it is slow and is very finicky. Epson Scan does a decent job, but I strongly recommend that you not let Epson do software updates. They make great hardware, but their software updates are often problematic.

My personal recommendation is to spend the $150 CAD on Vuescan Pro from Hamrick. I have been using Vuescan for over ten years and find it superb. The Pro version will also work with dedicated film and slide scanners and can save in a variety of non-compressed file formats. I would recommend TIFF as a minimum and never JPEG because it is so lossy. I have yet to find a scanner that Vuescan does not work with. In fact, it is the only software that works properly with old style film and slide scanners that have been dropped years ago by their makers.

Dedicated Slide Scanners

For those with a lot of slides, there are dedicated slide scanners that are very quick. However you are starting at around $350 USD for a starter unit going up to $1000 USD for a really good one. If you are running a slide scan service as part of your photo business, look into a dedicated box, but if you are just working on your own archive, it may not be worth it.

High Level Process

Get your media together and using a negative or slide cloth from a shop that handles darkroom gear, wipe down GENTLY your media as you get ready to scan it. A regular lint free cloth creates static which becomes a dust magnet. If there is detritus on any media, use some distilled water on a clean dry cotton towel to gently and slowly remove the junk. Do not use any liquid other than water, and spend the $1 or so for a jug of distilled water. Tap water may be too hard, or if you have a water softener, you don’t want salts on your media.

In your software choose the media type that you are scanning, typically negative, transparency or print. Match the media type to the actual media. If you are scanning slides (transparencies) your scanner has to have support for this. The Epson scanner noted above does.

In your software, choose your resolution. The higher the resolution that you select, the longer each scan takes. To allow for a print from the scan up to 24x36 inches from a 35mm slide or negative, choose 8000dpi which is a good scanner resolution setting. The actual dpi settings for a 24 x 36 print are 7200 x 10800 ppi if you will be printing at 300 dpi. If you are scanning for archive purposes 3300 x 5100 dpi is fine as this is sufficient resolution for an 11 x 17 print at 300 dpi which would be a scanner resolution setting of 4000 dpi. This guidance is based upon the scanner resolution recommended on this cheat sheet from Konrad at howtoscan.ca

Decide if you want the scanning software to do fixes or if you will do that later in Photoshop. Digital ICE works on colour, Dust Removal works on black and white. Unsharp mask creates the appearance of greater sharpness. Scanner software tools are very good, but some image softening can result. Doing it yourself in Photoshop will take longer, but you will likely get a better result. If you do not do fixes in the scanning software, your scans will go quicker (a little bit)

Now do a couple of test scans and open the scans in Photoshop or whatever editor you use to see if you like the results. If you do, get to the scanning. If not, try changing some of the settings in the scan software based on what you are seeing.

Get The Book

Konrad over at howtoscan.ca has a superb eBook on scanning that is completely free. Anyone who scans film of any kind needs to get it. You can download his book here. You can also purchase the complete Scanshop System on his site.

Summary

While time consuming, getting your old media into archivable digital storage is the best way to preserve thngs. Photos fade, transparencies shift colour, negatives can lose emulsion. Sooner rather than later if this older work matters to you.

Thanks very much for reading. Please subscribe to receive notifications of new articles and new podcast episodes. Until next time, peace.