Scanning negatives and converting them into digital format is completely possible, but you must have the proper tools to do so.

Scanning Negatives At Home:

Scanning at home is completely possible. All you need is a right kind of scanner with a computer at home. Normally there are two types of scanner.

Flatbed Scanners: Flatbed scanners are made to scan photos, images and documents. They are designed to copy the photos and documents and convert them into digital file by capturing the reflection of light. Negatives are transparent making the flatbed scanner incapable of scanning them. To scan negatives using flatbed scanners you should need a transparency adapter. The transparency adapter makes the flatbed scanner to capture the reflected light from the scanner’s lid. This way you can scan negatives using flatbed scanners, but without a transparency adapter you will get an image file with a dark square patch in it.

Film Scanners: If you have a lot of photos and want to convert them into digital files or want to take up negative scanning service job from home then you should invest in a film scanner. Film scanners are designed to scan films and negatives. These scanners have the capacity to give better output images, as it does not have any glass and the negatives are scanned directly through the image sensors. Moreover the light used in the film scanners is of high intensity than the flatbed scanners. Hence, you will get digital images of your negatives with very high resolutions.

High Image Resolution Is Important:

Whatever type of scanner you use. Digitally converted images should have great resolution. A flatbed scanner takes a lot of time to scan negatives with high resolution whereas a film scanner is very costly for negative scanning at home. Hence, you should either have to spend extremely high amount of time scanning the negatives with flatbed scanner or spend heavily to buy a film scanner. Both these options are costly in their own respect.

Availing Professional Help:

To save time and money, taking the help of professional negative scanning personnel is a very good option. Negative scanning companies use specifically designed scanners to scan negatives to give you digital images of very high resolution and quality. The professionally converted digital images are so good that you will not find any difference if you compare them with images taken from high resolution digital camera.

The professional negative scanning service providers will burn the images to a DVD and send it to you. These images can be stored in your computer and shared with family and friends without any hassles.

I used to think telecine was too professional for my amateur film transfers. A lot of people recommend the Canopus ADVC-300 to transfer VHS to DVD. For about $350 that seems affordable. But for film transfers I always thought telecines were too expensive. Well, I found a company that actually makes telecine easy and affordable. And the quality is close to perfection.

Movie Stuff in Utopia, Texas is recognized as the best telecine company in the world. It gets this reputation because it is very, very easy to use and the quality can be mistaken for that you would get from a true scanner, which is completely cost prohibitive. Maybe you own a company that is or is about to provide film transfers to DVD or Blu-ray for your customers. Or maybe you are like me and are thinking about transferring your own film to digital. Either way Movie Stuff makes it easy for the average layperson to come in and use the equipment and get a good transfer with minimal training and/or research.

If you are the kind of person that likes to do it all himself or herself, you may find it a little challenging to do 8mm to DVD without a good telecine or similar device. There are other options but they are not that suitable. Here is a short overview of the options.

1. Scanner
   1. Best quality
   2. Highest cost ($50,000 and up)
   3. Not practical for individual purchase
2. 3CCD Telecine
   1. Next highest quality
   2. $1,295-$8,995 with Movie Stuff; more expensive elsewhere
   3. Probably the best choice for the DIYer looking for quality
3. 1CCD Telecine
   1. Lowest quality
   2. Lower than $1,000
   3. Probably worth skipping since the gap between 1CCD and 3CCD is so huge

So, as you can probably see, a 3CCD telecine is probably your best bet. The great thing about Movie Stuff 3CCD telecines is that they are easy to use and the quality is very close to a true scanner. PC Magazine did side by side tests of the DV8 Sniper-HD and the industry’s leading scanner, the Rank Turbo, and said the quality was so close that they could only see the difference when comparing it directly to the Rank.

So, keep using that Canopus model for your VHS to DVD but take a look at Movie Stuff for your film transfers. And if you can not afford to buy, they will always be willing to use their in-house telecines to transfer your film for you.

Photo restoration was a niche business some years ago, when not many people knew about the magic computers can do. Many people are still ignorant about it. However restoring photos has become a very specialized and popular business today and with good reason. Expert photo editing can make your photos look exactly like they looked when they were taken.

Nearly all old photos develop blurry areas and white spots after years of neglect. They really ruin memories and don’t present the real picture to the new generation which wasn’t even born then. Photo editing can get rid of these and make them nearly identical to those old photos. Although it is difficult to fill the blurred spots with exactly the same elements, it is still possible with expert help.

Also, dust gathers over photos over many years. Since some of the photos are stacked one over the other, the photos are stained such that they cannot be removed without damaging the photo in some way or the others. However scanning these photos and convert slides to digital images allows computer programs to remove these stains and make the photos look like they never had any of them.

Not only that

Photo restoration services not only remove the blemishes from your photos, they can also remove things that were originally in the old photo, but not desired by you. For instance, you might have someone crying in an otherwise happy photo. You can just make the tears go away and make the photo full of smiling people and thus enriching your experience.

Image editing can also do other wonderful things such as changing the background of the photos completely. Yes, you really can do that! That means, a photo taken on a particularly dull day can become one taken under a perfectly bright sunny day. The best thing about it is that nobody will actually recognize that the background has been change by you.

In addition to that, you can also do other fun things such as inserting people who weren’t there. Imaging you standing along with your great, great grandparents in the photo taken at a time when you weren’t even born yet. That kind of stuff is what makes photo editing a fun experience for you. You can create an entirely different picture out of a combination of pictures.

Most of the photo restoration services offer reasonably prices for bringing back your old memories. Before choosing a vendor, be sure to check out with multiple services and know the average charged by the vendors in your city. Check online reviews might also help you find the best restoration service in your neighborhood.

You no doubt want to convert all those slides that have been sitting in the attic gathering dust. Before you choose a slide scanning service however, you need to take care of a few things. Not all scanning services are equal. Not all of them are professional enough to give you the best possible images. Choose your scanning service only after doing proper research about them.

Formats

Before scanning your slides, there is something you should know about digital conversion. When you slides are scanned, they are converted into the photos that you see on your computer. Now these can be converted into a number of different formats such as JPEG, PNG or BMP. Most of the scanning services will convert into one of these three formats, since they can be viewed on any computer.

Some of the services however, might prefer to format the images into a different type, such as PSD file or any other thing. It may be because such images can only be opened and viewed using specialized software and you may have to pay for it. The above mentioned PSD format, for instance, can only be opened by Adobe Photoshop and related software, which can be quiet expensive.

Some slide scanning services may want to make some more money by storing your slides in these formats and then selling you the software that is necessary to view them. Beware of such money leeching services. Ask them specifically which format they convert their files into. Insist that they only give you the images in one of the three above mentioned image formats.

Storage

Most services will convert your 35mm slides into digital images and store them on to a CD or DVD. This service should be part of the scanning service and you shouldn’t be billed separately for this. If that is the case with your service, the people there are just trying to squeeze some extra bucks out of you. Make sure that that you are offered for free before you hand your slides over to them.

Although most of the professional scanning services use high end scanners which are capable of converting your slides into really high quality images, not all do. Some may just use cheap scanners and charge you big bucks for it. The only way to know if their service is good is to check out the forums on the internet for any complaints (or praises).

Hiring slide scanning services to scan thousands of your slides is a very expensive investment. If the digital images turn out well, your investment it well worth it. However, if they aren’t of the best quality, you may have to invest in a better service all over again. Hence it is better to always do proper research before zeroing in on any scanning service.

It may sound crazy but if you want to transfer VHS to DVD you don’t really want to transfer VHS to DVD.  Instead, you want to transfer VHS to a digital file format that can best preserve the details of your originals.

If you want to digitally edit your movies, add music, add audio and video transitions, etc., then you need to transfer your analog video to a digital file format such as MP4 or AVI. These file formats are known as being the most reliable for video editing. They are uncompressed digital file formats that preserve a very high level image quality. DVD image quality is at a lower resolution than these ‘raw’ MP4 and AVI file formats.

So, if you want to edit your home videos, you will need to first convert them to MP4 or AVI files that are then copied to a data DVD or a portable drive. Then you can import the files into a video editing software program such as Apple’s ‘Final Cut’ or Adobe’s ‘Premiere’ to do the video editing. After you are done editing, then you can author the DVD and burn your home movie editing projects to the DVD.

If you are hiring a digital transfer company to do the transfer from Super 8mm film or VHS tape, then you need to request uncompressed high resolution digital files for the final delivery. It will probably cost more but I think it is worth it and you probably do too or you would not have read this far into this article. Correct?

So never convert VHS tapes to DVD – as crazy as that statement sounds. Instead, convert your home movies to MP4 or AVI first. Do this – and do it well – and you can preserve your home movies for generations to come. Good luck.

The cost: You will find frames that can range more than two hundred dollars and you can certainly get a less than fifty dollar frame. According to your needs you should get the most practicable digital photo frame.

Doing the job yourself

Now, you might be thinking whether doing the job yourself would turn out to be cheaper than delegating the job to a scanning service. Of course, if you have a flatbed scanner, you would like to do the job yourself and save some money. Let us look at what goes into scanning all of your photos using a scanner at home.

The first thing that you have to do is take out the photos and see if they have faded in any way. If they are so faded that you can’t recognize anything, the scanner won’t be able to magically bring everything back. You should also wipe off any kind of dust that has accumulated on the photos over the years.

If some dirt particles are too stubborn, use a wet cloth and rub it on the dirt by pressing gently so that no part of the photo is damaged. The next thing that you have to do is to sort out your photos and organize them into groups so that you can scan them in a particular order. This is not necessary, but will make your job easier when you are placing photos in different folders.

A Professional scanning service

Of course, doing all the scanning work yourself is a big hassle and is a very time consuming job if you are a working professional. This is where a professional photo scanning service is the most useful. They take care of all the mess related and give you digital versions of all those photos.

Since they do the job in bulk the cost is usually not very high. It could be about 30-40 cents per photo scan in most cases. Also, since they are most used to be the job, they will be able to do the job more efficiently. Once you hand the job over to service, they will do all the work such as organizing your photos according to your preference.

Most of the professional scanning services use scanners with higher dpi which means greater clarity. The printer you use at home might not be able to get you the best scanned pictures since they are means for normal use and not for high resolution images.

Also a professional photo scanning service will be able to resize all the digital images of your photos into similar sizes. This will make the whole album on the PC or Mac look much better. If you are not sure whether you should do the job yourself or give it to a scanning service, it is always wiser to choose the second option and not take any chances with your precious photos.

However, you do not need to worry since photo restoration services can help you bring those photos back to life and even enhance them ways that you might not imagine. Here, we will take a look at some of the tools and techniques used by the photo restorers so that you can choose an appropriate one for restoring your old photos.

Traditional Techniques

The people restoring your photos are skilled people who can make you photo look the way they looked when you first took them. Many of the photo restoration techniques are decades old, but are still somewhat effective. They use tools such as dyes, brushes, fixers, chemicals, and other equipment such as fixers and toners to do their job.

These kinds of photo restoration methods are mostly done manually i.e., by hand and do take quite a bit of time and hard work to complete. However, for very old photos which are very damages, these methods work very well and can produce very desirable results.

Modern Techniques

As is human natures, there are new ways to do everything in the world. Photo restoration services are not any different for that matter. Today, much of the photo restoration work is done using digital techniques. They use specialized software in order to do the job. Digital photo restoration is a bit quicker than the traditional methods and has many other advantages too.

Digital photo restoration is done by using scanners and a computer. The scanner first scans the old damaged photos and converts into a digital format. This is then stored into the computer so that it can be manipulated and restored. Once all the editing has been done and the restorer has done all he can to restore the photo, he will either mail it to you or stored them in a CD or DVD for storage.

The photo restorer uses specialized photo editing software. Popular examples of such software are Adobe Photoshop and GIMP. These kinds of software have many automated functions for jobs such as tonal correction or red eye correction. Such automated tools are very useful to correct any blemishes that might have occurred when the photos were taken.

Other more difficult tasks such as erasing the folds or bringing back the parts of the photos that have faded over the years is done manually. These tasks are usually very time consuming for the photo restoration services and also somewhat difficult to do.

Now that you know quite a bit about both the photo restoration methods, you can choose services which are best suited for your purpose. If your photos have deteriorated only somewhat, you can even do the job at home by using software. Otherwise, you would be wise to hand the job over to an expert.

The first thing to remember about converting 35mm slides is that you do not lose the original slides. They are still preserved as they were all these years. What you do is just scan those slide photos using scanners and make a digital image of the photos to store them onto a computer. There is absolutely nothing complicated about the job at all.

The second thing is it is much easier to manage digital photos on the computer than it is to take care of all those 35mm slides jutting from the old boxes in the attic. Since they are computer, you can easily group them virtually and access any photo you want to without going through all the photos just to find one of them. That is because each digital photo is converted into a file and given a name.

For those who are worried about the quality of the scanned photos, this too is needless worry. With the high resolution scanners available today, you can get even better quality photos than the original 35mm slides. You may say that you cannot convert something old into a better one and that it may at best match the quality of the old photo.

However, this is not the case when converting 35mm slides to digital formats. See, resolution in scanners is measured in dots per inch or simply dpi. A normal scanner at home will have a dpi resolution of around 3000. However, there are even better scanners available that have much higher resolutions in the range of 4200 or even 5000.

These scanners will first scan the 35mm slide photos as they are. Once done, the software that comes with the scanner will try to improve the quality of the scanned images. It does so using some automatic functions build into it. It can do things such as correcting the tone of the photo. This is immensely helpful since the original 35mm slide photos may have faded a bit over the years.

Moreover, once you have saved a copy of the photo on to your computer, you can do all kinds of fun things with it. Just have the original scanned photo saved into a folder. Then make more copies of this file so that you can manipulate it to will. You can add colors to a black and white photo or you could add something that you would like to be in the photo.

Converting the 35mm slides to digital format also means that you can correct the photo and make it better, for instance, by removing the stains that may have collected onto the original photo in the past many years.

The 35mm film scanner was designed to scan photographic film and save it in your computer. It does this using its own computer processor in tandem using a scan head. It is also designed to capture transparent films such as the 35mm. The film is mounted on a holder that, in some models, is drawn by the device.

Film scanners have been gaining popularity with people due to its quality and efficiency.  It saves clear digital representations of the original image onto your computer. Also, the results usually are very breathtaking if you use the original film.

35mm film  scanners can be found at a local photography or electronics stores. You could also visit online retailers and save a few bucks.

When buying a scanner the biggest concern is budget. Scanners are expensive and can reach $500+, but most people aren’t professional photographers and don’t need the high-fidelity scanning powers of these high-end film scanners. The lowest priced scanners only cost $100 – $150, but at those ranges a little quality is sacrificed. For example, the Wolverine 35mm scanner is priced in those ranges, but it has been know to produce darker images and may loose some of the original photograph’s details.

When comparing the different scanners, regardless weather they are the high-end models or the entry level ones, you should take into consideration your needs, bit depth, resolution, and bundled editing software. All of these can affect quality of the converted file (save for your needs). For example, higher resolution can give you better pictures while bit depth affects colour quality. Even though editing software is not really needed, since you can use other programs such as Photoshop, it’s still good to have because those not familiar with Photoshop could benefit from simple user-friendly editing software which could give them the results they were looking for.

Finally, like any other thing you’re buying, you should look at multiple models within your budget before buying. This gives you not only more options, but also a good idea of what you’re getting.

These scanners are simply amazing. Preserving your memories will be a snap. I strongly recommend getting a scanner if you have many old pictures or 35mm negatives lying around and wish to preserve them for the next couple of generations to enjoy.