The_Munchmaster Posted May 22, 2006 Report Share Posted May 22, 2006 Although I've recently got into digital photography I have a huge number of prints / negatives from my film days. I would like to have them converted to digital so that I can enhance the wants I really want on Photoshop. I thought about buying a flat bed scanner and scanning the prints but read that scanning the negatives is much better. However negative scanners are much more expensive than flat bed scanners and once you've scanned all your negatives the scanner is redundant. Is scanning the print (or the negative) on a flat bed scanner good enough? Also JPEG or TIFF? I hear TIFF is better quality, but can TIFF digital images be manipulated with Photoshop in the same way that JPEG can? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kamui Posted May 22, 2006 Report Share Posted May 22, 2006 Tif format is unmanipulated and uncompressed. Therefore it is recommended to scan the images in TIF format and use it as master. You can manipulate Tif without any problems in Photoshop, but anyway I would never work with the original file but with a copy of it which you can saved in any format you like like Jpg et al. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BaronTT Posted May 23, 2006 Report Share Posted May 23, 2006 I started on a similar project about a year ago. Bought a high quality scanner that did negatives exceptionally well. I gave up after 1 roll of film! Each frame took about 20 minutes to scan and touch up, on average! I also contacted a published expert on digital scanning and photography and he mentioned that I was silly to even try such a huge undertaking because of the time necessary. He suggested storing the film negatives and using them when I had a particular frame I was interested in. Good luck! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AF16 Posted May 23, 2006 Report Share Posted May 23, 2006 How about a flatbedscanner that takes negatives? It seems like you can take more than one picture of the time and the computer sort them into diffrent images. I'm thinking of buying such a flatbedscanner to copy old paperpictures and old negatives. It's about 120$. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
short-time Posted May 23, 2006 Report Share Posted May 23, 2006 Scanning slides or negatives is indeed a very time consuming task if you have several hundred or more to do. You can use either a dedicated slide/film strip scanner like those made by Nikon and Minolta which depending on model can get quite expensive. The time it takes to scan an image isn?t a big problem (depending on the resolution you select), it?s the time you spend editing the images in say Photoshop that?s really time consuming. By the way, I think tiff is the only way to go here considering the time you will be investing and keep in mind tiff images scanned at high resolutions really eats up disk space. Having said this I own both an HP slide scanner and recently bought a HP 4850 flatbed scanner which will also scan four slides at a time or a strip of film with an optical resolution up to 4800 x 9600 dpi. Not bad considering it only cost me about $125. Also, HP offers the 4890 which I believe will scan up to 16 slides at a time or 30 negatives, but doubt if this offers much of an advantage as four at a time is enough to keep you busy for the better part of an hour. Whatever scanner you use I would highly recommend that you discard as many slides or negatives as you possibly can. No since in wasting time scanning shots that really aren?t worth keeping. ST Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_Munchmaster Posted May 23, 2006 Author Report Share Posted May 23, 2006 Good advice ST. I've got about 2,000 negatives, so probably a waste of time and money to scan them all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BaronTT Posted May 24, 2006 Report Share Posted May 24, 2006 I don't have much to add to the othe posters. My Photo scanner can do 16 frames at a time, with up to 4800 dpi Optical /9600 dpi micro sub scan. Very good quality. With hi-rez mode, each frame can be HUGE, eg 500MB or more. But the biggest time consumer was touching up the photos. Even using Digital Ice didn't save a whole lot of time. As I mentioned, about 20 minutes per frame. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AF16 Posted May 24, 2006 Report Share Posted May 24, 2006 short-time said:Scanning slides or negatives is indeed a very time consuming task if you have several hundred or more to do. You can use either a dedicated slide/film strip scanner like those made by Nikon and Minolta which depending on model can get quite expensive. The time it takes to scan an image isn?t a big problem (depending on the resolution you select), it?s the time you spend editing the images in say Photoshop that?s really time consuming. By the way, I think tiff is the only way to go here considering the time you will be investing and keep in mind tiff images scanned at high resolutions really eats up disk space. Having said this I own both an HP slide scanner and recently bought a HP 4850 flatbed scanner which will also scan four slides at a time or a strip of film with an optical resolution up to 4800 x 9600 dpi. Not bad considering it only cost me about $125. Also, HP offers the 4890 which I believe will scan up to 16 slides at a time or 30 negatives, but doubt if this offers much of an advantage as four at a time is enough to keep you busy for the better part of an hour. Whatever scanner you use I would highly recommend that you discard as many slides or negatives as you possibly can. No since in wasting time scanning shots that really aren?t worth keeping. ST Why do you have to edit the pictures after scanning them? I read a review of HP 4890 that said it worked porly on dias, do you think it's ok? I have some old pictures and about 800 dias that I would like to scan. The diaspictures I would like to burn to a DVD and make a slideshow. Need to be ok quality but not 500 mb. My digital pictures are about 2 mb pr. picture and that's ok. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BaronTT Posted May 24, 2006 Report Share Posted May 24, 2006 Photos need to be edited to take out imperfections and also re-balance colors. No matter how good the negative, I saw many many blemishes which I had to take out. Scratches, spots, etc etc. I sometimes used Digital Ice, a very good SW package which fixes a lot of these blemishes automatically, but I still had to go through each frame manually. Maybe I was being too perfect. However, I did trade several e-mails with a digital photograohy author, and he mentioned it was stupid to do this on a 'bulk' basis. Just do frames that you're interested in NOW. Otherwise, just store the negatives and save them for your archives. He mentioned that even he, an expert, would take 15-20 minutes for each frame. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adikgede Posted May 24, 2006 Report Share Posted May 24, 2006 If you want to digitize lots of slides you need a scanner with a batch feeder, very expensive. you can also experiment with a slide projector and a digital camera mounted above the projector. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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