Slides don’t last forever, no matter how safely they are
stored. With the passing time, the colors in the film start fading and many
times mold begin to appear thus your entire image is destroyed. Fortunately you
can stop your slide from degrading. You can do this work yourself too. We are
sharing some steps that you can follow to do the best slide scanning.
Step 1
First of all look which is the best scanner for slide scanning. If you are going to buy
the scanner, buy the one that is of good quality and is within your range. The
best scanner produces the best results. There are some scanners that digitally
remove most dust and scratch marks. So the appearance of the film is improved. Some
scanners have "auto-feed" system for slides, for pre-loading a number
of images for automatic scanning.
Step 2
Choose the scanning software. Some scanners come with
proprietary scanning software which are sufficient. There are software that you
can choose in order to get the best results from your scanner. They perform
superb and have features like automatic color correction, automatic scan,
compatibility with almost all brands and models of scanners. You also need to
choose photo editing software. Photo editing software programs are very helpful
in doing the touch up of the images that are scanned. These programs can help
in fixing the brightness/contrast, fade, color correction manually. It is also
possible to edit scratches. There are many free online photo editing software
available where you can upload your image and correct the color and brightness.
Step 3
Organize the slides manually before scanning. This will make
it much easier to arrange them to find your required slide.
Step 4
Make the setting of your scanner and software. Read the user
manuals for understanding how to use each item. The beginners should select the
automatic setting for the color and brightness. If you change the setting of
every image manually, it can produce better results. It is a time consuming
process so using the default automatic settings can also give great results.
Choose the highest available resolution because the lower
resolutions mean lower quality. Select
the most common formats like JPEG and TIFF. TIFF images are completely uncompressed
and its files are about 4 xs larger than JPEG. JPEG images are technically
compressed. JPEG is the best format option.
Step 5
Now it is the time to scan your slides. If you are using automatic
feeder for scanning the slides, check the slides that get struck and don't
fully capture.
If you think this slide scanning task sounds too difficult or
costly, you can choose professional services to meet your needs. Many people
like to scan their slides on their own for keeping their old format films in
their homes. This guide is very useful and you can scan your old slides by your
own if you follow the above steps. This is for the beginners who have never
scanned the slides before.