Step By Step Beginners Guide To Slide Scanning

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.