Has anyone scanned their negatives and slides?

Charlie and I want to scan our negatives and slides and get them onto CD's. We've checked into a service (whoa, now there's a great, new business for someone to check into) but think we want to do it ourselves so we can "weed out" what we want and don't want to have in our archives. We really want our children to have CD's of all of the photos for their families and future families to enjoy too.

Anyone know of a great system?

Thanks,
Jill, founder

I've scanned thousands of negatives and slides on my all in one printer/scanner/copier. It's time consuming but it works.

i college we scanned negatives, but had a film strip like thing that the neg went into, and i think it had its own program too, because it was easy to do and the images came out like a picture. Good luck

I am glad you posted. Sorry I haven't scanned anything myself but I have just started researching a scanner to do the very same thing. So far I have found hp has a couple photo scanners with the capability of scanning slides and negatives for reasonable price ($100-$150). I have always been happy with my other hp products that I am thinking about giving them a try.

I just finished scanning in a little over a hundred of my dad's slides from when he was in Vietnam (slides from the mid 60's). I am working through color balancing and cleaning them up so they can be put in the book I am making him for fathers day. He never had the slides made into photos and no one has never seen the images in anything but slide form.

Anyway, I used my DH's scanner, which is a UMAX Powerlook III (my scanner doesn't do slides). Next I will be scanning in 30 years of negatives from when I was growing up so I can archive them and re-do my childhood books and replace any damaged photos.

Hardware and Software: I use a MAC G4 and Photoshop CS2 with the UMAX scanners and my printers are Epsons. For printing my photos I only use Ilford Gallerie Ink Jet Photo paper.

Photo restoration is a time consuming project but very enjoyable and very much worth the effort put into it. I love doing it and wish I could have a full time job doing it. It would make a neat home based business for sure.

Good luck with your project Jill. I am sure your children (and future generations) will appreciate all the work you and your DH are putting into it!

I haven't scanned all my negatives, but have done a few. My Epson scanner does it.

I would buy the scanner and hire a teen to do it! That's my suggestion. You'll have to go thur the images yourself later.

I have an old HP Scanjet 5500c that has a slide/negative scanner attachment. Very tedious! I find it easier to scan the photos. Really! Just do it at a high resolution. Plus my scanner has an auto-photo-feed. Much better but still needs to babysat.

i also scanned my negatives with my epson scanner, but, as indicated, it is time consuming. but i'm glad i did it. the negatives were getting damaged from my storage system (a shoebox!), and i had some great shots in there that i didn't have prints for. now i have the pics on a cd.

I have so many negatives from when I was younger and my dad has boxes of slides from when he was in the army in the 60s that I would love more than anything to do, but my printer doesn't do it (Dell all-in-one), at least not that I know of. I'm not in the market for new hardware, so I guess I'll be looking into a service. Ugh!

I was looking into this a while back and found a machine that does it for you. It is called the HP Scanjet 4370 photo scanner. It is $99.00 I was looking into this one because of the price and the size. HTH!

I was told about a lady in our area who worked all of last year scanning every negative and photo in her home. She says it's worth it but so time consuming. We're going to get together so she can show me what she's done. In the meantime, I'm still looking for the hardware and have my eyes open for a competant teen...LOL.

Thanks for your suggestions, I'm checking into all of them.

Thanks for sharing the information about your lives too.

Jill

I have this really good scanner at my work that comes with an attachment that scans negatives. It is an HP scanjet 5590. If you don't have the negative and scan a regular picture it comes out so clear on this machine also. It is a great machine. I have an HP all in one printer at home but the negative attachment only works on scanners, not all in ones.....

I am also in the market to get my negatives scanned. I have lots of great pictures from my honeymoon and studying abroad that I really want to have on the computer.....I asked at Walmart and to get them send out is $7 a roll....yikes!!! That is not good considering I have about 100 rolls....

Oh well...not sure what I am going to do.

Good luck!!!

Michelle

• Lefa Said:

I've done the same thing - we have an Epson printer that has a holder for the negatives. The quality is pretty good and after printing them online, they look great to me!

we have an epson perfection 1650 (i think) scanner..works great! it has an attachment for the inside cover that will hold negatives and slides, then there is a setting for scanning them, so easy!

I can also put multiple pictures on the flat bed and it will scan each individual picture as it's own file (instead of scanning everything into one file), this has been really handy since i'm in the process of scanning in all my parents and grandmothers pictures!

I have the Epson 1660, has the neg./slide adapter. It was very reasonable, I think around 100.00. It is a few years old, so they may have more efficient hardware now.

Have used it multiple times and works great. Just is a bit of a project, but well worth the results.

I'm also in the process of scanning my parent's slides into my computer. I have an HP ScanJet 5370C that has the transparency adapter for scanning slides. What resolution do you recommend for scanning?

I have an HP Scanjet 4890. I love it. It can scan 16 slides or 20 35mm negatives, or a few of the other medium format slides in one scan.

Then they save each one in it's own file so you don't have to go and save each one when you scan them.

First off, my disclaimer... I am the owner of http://www.slidesinaflash.com and do slide digitizing commercially. (I didn't make it a link, the forum did so automatically.)

I wanted to weigh in on this topic because I was once in the same situation as you all, and I really feel strongly about preserving slides. They do deteriorate over time, and I've seen a lot of mold and mildew damage!

While I can understand wanting to weed through them yourself, processing slides can be very time consuming. Especially if you go the scanning route, and especially if you only have a flat bed scanner that does 4-12 at a time.

If you have a decent digital camera I recommend looking into the Slide Xtender at http://www.photosolve.com (no relation to me, but I own one of these). This $80 device is just a holder that lets you "copy" slides with a camera.

Another time-tested and easy way to digitize your slides is to set up the projector, set up your camera on a tripod aimed at the screen and just shoot pictures of the screen. The quality might not be superb, but at least you'll have a record of what's on the slides to help you sort them.

Finally, a tip about resolution of scanners since this is the more traditionally way to digitize slides. Most of the time, when you scan above 3000 dpi, you start to pick up the actual grains of the film. This does not result in higher quality image, it just adds noise. You are better off scanning at just below 3000 dpi and then if you need to make huge prints you can increase the resolution with Photoshop.

Any route you take, be prepared to do a lot of touch-up and post-processing, especially on older film.

As I said in my disclaimer, I do this for my job, and I enjoy it, but it is time consuming, and scanners and slide feeders can get expensive.

Hiring someone may not be quite as much of a labor of love (maybe I'm talking to the wrong people here, scrapbookers probably Love labors of love!) but.... keep in mind that you can send out your 1000 slides and have a DVD back to you faster than it takes Amazon to ship you a scanner. Or, at least keep it in mind for your neighbor who begs you to digitize her collection as soon as you finish your own.

Sara

• Sara G Said:

the same goes for negatives. I see so many negs which have fingerprints, scratches, food residue, water damage, mildew and rips that people have decided too late that they need to make prints from. What's worse is it's not just "regular people" but some of my worst offenders are people who's livelihood depends on the prints from that neg.

I've been scanning my negs using the scanners at the photo lab where I work. I'm halfway through the scanning process of about 700 rolls of film. I haven't even looked at them in detail (checking for dust and scratches that I can correct for in photoshop) or renamed them using my digital filing system. If I had to do it all over again, I'd pay a professional to do it for me.

look at the slides and negs on a lightbox. you can usually weed out the majority of what you don't want by using a magnifying loupe or glass. that will cut down on what you actually end up scanning.

I am going to do the same thing this coming summer..I searched online for "negative reader" and several great scanners came up..one even had Adobe Elements software FREE with it and it seems like it was only around $400 for the entire package...much cheaper that having someone else do years worth for you.