Saturday, April 2, 2011

Why Choose Modern Slide Scanning Service for Digital Conversion?

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.

What todays' scanning services do is scan them into digital formats so that they can be stored electronically. That means they can be copied on to your computer or SD cards or anywhere you normally store all your digital files. This way, they would never be lost and maintain their present quality practically forever. Even compared to maybe a decade ago, digital scanning has come a long way.

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.

The PNG format one the other hand has a very large file size. If you only have a few slides to be converted and it is necessary to have the best quality possible, you should scan your slides into this format. If you want to convert thousands of slides into the PNG format, you would want to have large hard disks, which by the way are dirt cheap these days.

If you have decided to finally scan those slides of yours, you just need to do some preparation. The first job would be to group the slides into neat categories so that they are easy to scan and store in their own folders. Secondly, make sure that the slides are as clean as possible. Old slides that have been stored away for years may have gathered a lot of dust and may have attracted some stains.

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.

One of the thoughts that might cross your mind is why not scan all those slides at home rather than spending on professional slide scanning services? If you only have a few photos and just want to carry them on your smart phone and don't need high quality, using your home scanner is a very practical choice.

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:



No comments: