Preserving 35mm slides or really any traditional slides which were produced years ago is one of the most difficult jobs. In order that they don't get exposed and damaged, you probably have stacked them all in a store room. However, this is really unnecessary today what with modern slide scanning services using advanced techniques to scan them into digital formats which are of high quality.
When you hand your slides over to a scanning service, it is scanned and stored in one of the digital formats. Once this is done, they can be stored anywhere digitally. That can be on your PC or Mac or even thumb drives, where they will be safe and never deteriorate. Scanning technology has come a long way over the past few years and especially over the past 10 years.
When slide scanning services scan your slides, they usually convert them into image file formats. These can be JPEG, PNG, BMP or anything which is suitable. There are small differences between these formats. For instance, images, stored in the JPEG format are small in size and you can easily fit thousands of them in a small SD card, albeit with somewhat lower quality.
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.
Now, if you cannot clean the slides completely, you don't need to despair. You can find many images editing software that will help you remove the dirt specs from the pictures once you have stored them on your computer. Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro are the most popular image manipulating software around. If you are looking for some free software alternatives, try 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, if you want high quality images, you need professional slide scanning machines to do the job which is most often only available only with scanning services. Besides, if you have many, many slides to be scanned, doing the job at home can take days and probably will be more expensive in terms of power usage.
When you hand your slides over to a scanning service, it is scanned and stored in one of the digital formats. Once this is done, they can be stored anywhere digitally. That can be on your PC or Mac or even thumb drives, where they will be safe and never deteriorate. Scanning technology has come a long way over the past few years and especially over the past 10 years.
When slide scanning services scan your slides, they usually convert them into image file formats. These can be JPEG, PNG, BMP or anything which is suitable. There are small differences between these formats. For instance, images, stored in the JPEG format are small in size and you can easily fit thousands of them in a small SD card, albeit with somewhat lower quality.
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.
Now, if you cannot clean the slides completely, you don't need to despair. You can find many images editing software that will help you remove the dirt specs from the pictures once you have stored them on your computer. Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro are the most popular image manipulating software around. If you are looking for some free software alternatives, try 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, if you want high quality images, you need professional slide scanning machines to do the job which is most often only available only with scanning services. Besides, if you have many, many slides to be scanned, doing the job at home can take days and probably will be more expensive in terms of power usage.
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There are many quality online 35mm best slide scanning service available, that can save you the time and heartache of doing it at home yourself. These professional companies can convert your slides to digital images.
Great post! I really appreciate your blog post and would like to read your next blog post regarding modern slide scanning services.
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