Tips for Scanning Negatives

Storing film negatives can become a hassle quite quickly, and since today's photography is turning more and more digital in nature, you may want to find a digital storage option for your negatives and slides. Scanning negatives and turning them into a digital file is entirely possible, but you need the right equipment to do so.

Scanning Negatives at Home with a Flatbed Scanne

If you have a scanner with the right adapter, you can scan negatives and slides at home using a simple flatbed scanner. Keep in mind that simply putting your negatives on a flatbed scanner will not work. Flatbed scanners are designed to scan photos by capturing the reflection of the light shown on them. Because negatives are transparent, this does not work. You need a transparency adapter to scan negatives. The transparency adapter, when used in place of the scanner's lid, shines light onto the negatives from above, and the sensors can pick up this light and capture a digital image of the print. Without the adapter, a scanned negative or transparency will look like a big black square.

Scanning Negatives at Home with Film Scanners

If you plan on scanning negatives frequently, you may want to purchase a scanner designed to scan film. These scanners give you a better final image, because there is no piece of glass between the negative and the image sensor. Also, the light is more intense with one of these scanners. They also typically have a higher dpi resolution than flatbed scanners.

Another reason film scanners give a better final image has to do with the density of the image. Photographs have a density of approximately 2.0, and negatives have a density of about 3.0. Because flatbed scanners are designed primarily for documents and photographs, they are calibrated closer to the 2.0 range. This means that scanning negatives with a flatbed scanner will result in tonal loss. This is slight, as in a negative the tonal loss occurs mostly in lighter areas, but it does affect the final image quality a bit.

High Resolution Is Key

Regardless of whether you use a flatbed scanner or a film scanner, you will want to scan your negatives at the highest resolution possible. This will make the scanning process take a while, but if you intend to make prints off of the resulting digital photos, you will be glad you took the time to scan the picture at a high resolution.

Professional Help Is Available

While you can scan negatives at home, it takes quite a bit of time, particularly if you scan them at the high resolution necessary for images you wish to eventually print. To save yourself some time, consider sending your negatives away for professional negative scanning services.

Negative scanning companies will scan your images at an extremely high resolution using scanners specifically designed for scanning negatives, giving you high quality digital images that you can use for just about any purpose, from print to web to archival. In fact, the quality from a professionally scanned image placed onto a CD is so good that you do not have to hang on to those negatives any longer. You can dispose of them, using the CD as your record of the images. Hiring a professional to scan your negatives will save you time, and in the long run, it may also save you money, because you will not need to buy special equipment to get the quality images you need.