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.

As is the case with video and music photos too are better stored in digital formats for longevity. This is exactly what scanning services today do. Once scanned into digital formats, your slides can then be stored anywhere you want such as your home computer, a flash drive or even your smartphone. All this has become possible due to the advances in scanning techniques over the last decade or two.

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.

If you want very high quality images, which are as good as the original slides, you would want to go with the PNG format. The problem with PNG format images is that they occupy a lot of space, which can go into several megabytes. If you have a large enough hard disk storage, which is inexpensive these days, you can store thousands of scanned slides in this format.

Once you have decided to scan your slides, you need to do some preparatory work before you go ahead. If you have tons of slides to be converted, better organize them into separate groups before handing them over to professionals. Also, if your slides are very old, they might be stained with dirt, some of it tough to remove. Nonetheless, clean the slides as much as possible without damaging them.

After the best of your efforts, if some dirt specs still remain on the slides, you have help in the form of photo editing programs. You can virtually remove any kind of undesirable elements from your photos. The best of such programs are the famous Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. Inexpensive alternatives also exist such as Pixelmator for the Max as do free options such as GIMP.

Finally, you might be thinking whether to slide all those slides at home using your home scanner or to get the job done from slide scanning services. The right answer would depend on how many slides you want to convert and whether the scanner you have is good enough to scan those slides into high quality image files.

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.




About the Author:



0 comments

Web site development, PHP programming's Fan Box