what to do about photos on negatives?

[abbyandangel]

I started a scrapbook of our disney trips. This project is starting to cost a fortune and consume my life. Our first couple trips were pre digital camera. I have all these negatives that I would like to convert to a useable format. At first I thought I'd just take then to Walmart and have then put on a CD or something. Then I saw I could buy a HP or Cannon printer that would scan negatives. Does anyone have experience with scanning negatives? Could you recommend a printer? Any advice about the best way to complete this process would be appreciated.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I started a scrapbook of our disney trips. This project is starting to cost a fortune and consume my life. Our first couple trips were pre digital camera. I have all these negatives that I would like to convert to a useable format. At first I thought I'd just take then to Walmart and have then put on a CD or something. Then I saw I could buy a HP or Cannon printer that would scan negatives. Does anyone have experience with scanning negatives? Could you recommend a printer? Any advice about the best way to complete this process would be appreciated.

Scanning negatives is a pain. Unless you want to fuss over each shot and make adjustments, I would recommend that you send them to a service. I think that ScanCafe is the best value, but they are overseas and it gives a lot of people the willies to send their negatives that far.

 

[photo_chick]

I agree it is a pain to scan negatives, slides too. But if you can't afford a service the home scanners do a good job of it if you know what you're doing. I use an Epson Perfection 4880 and have done thousands of negatives and slides with it. It's tedious, monotonous work though.

 

[Gdad]

I use an Epson Perfection V500. It scans a dozen 35mm negatives at a time and does a decent job for what I use it for. Fairly good value at under $200. I don't find it all that tedious because once you set it to scanning you can just let it do it's thing.

What printer scans negatives- like a printer/scanner/copier type machine? Be sure you get something with a built in illuminator for scanning.

 

[Groucho]

After much fiddling, I have a system that I'm happy with now for scanning negatives. And I just got there within the past week or two after having the scanner for a year or so!

It involved a Nikon Coolscan 4000 (usually ~$500), VueScan, and scanning an unexposed frame multiple times then manually tweaking the RGB gains while looking at a histogram to get the correct film base color, then scanning the photos into 60 meg TIFFs which I then convert in Lightroom to compressed DNGs, usually 35-40 megs large. (Which is way better than the 140+ meg images I was getting before!)

In other words - it is a bit of work - but I am getting fairly consistent results now and am having to do little tweaking afterwards. It is not for the faint of heart, if you want the best results though.

If you don't have too many negatives, it is probably best to pick a place that offers negative scanning as a service and go with them. If trying a local place, have them just do one roll first to make sure that you are happy with the results. If you have a lot to scan, then one of the <$200 Epsons with Digital ICE (which uses infrared to filter out dust and scratches - not perfect, but it helps) is probably your best bet.

 

[RSHEALAND]

I have used a Ion FILM2SD for both slides and negatives. It converts them to a SD card and was about $100 or $120 from BESTBUY

 

[seashoreCM]

Most film scanners take negatives. Currently I suggest buying a scanner with at least 4800x4800 dpi optical resolution. There are a lot of scanners that scan both film and ordinary documents; the film slot is in the lid.

After scanning a few dozen negatives you may become skilled enough to define perhaps five scanner settings (mainly involving lighter or darker). Then eyeball each negative and quickly choose which of your defined settings to use, then scan the negative once and go on to the next negative.

The vast amount of time people spend scanning negatives (also slides and also prints) comes about because they want to tweak something and then scan it again.

Photofinishers developing and printing film typically eyeballed each picture and quickly chose one of perhaps five light/dark settings to print it (for better or worse!) and then went on to the next negative on the roll. Or maybe the machine made the light/dark setting automatically.

If you send out your negatives to be scanned digitally, it is possible that the photofinisher does the same thing, eyeball each and quickly choose one of perhaps 5 settings. Or worse, he scans them all using just one "average" setting which you could just as well do yourself!

Digital camera hints: http://www.cockam.com/digicam.htm