Film and negative scanning questions 126/110 - do it myself or commercial?

Forums › Digital Imaging › Film and negative scanning questions 126/110 - do it myself or commercial?

gzt

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#98675 3-Mar-2012 21:07

Most of my parents family photos are degrading badly.

I believe most were taken on the cartridge film cameras popular in the mid 70's and early 80's.

I see film scanners advertised are 35mm. Do any or all support other film formats like 126 and 110?

Any device recommendations?

Should buy a device and painstakingly do it myself for the best results, or are commercial services the way to go?

How good are the commercial scanning services - any feedback?

Thanks!

Zeon

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#590017 3-Mar-2012 21:18

We may be able to offer a commercial service for this (we have some pretty massive film scanners). What kind of volume are you looking at? Also how many images per spiel? Our machines are auto so if you have more images per spiel that's cheaper I think :)

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gzt

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#590045 3-Mar-2012 22:34

Not sure exactly. Maybe around 400 shots. It will be a week or so before I get some idea. What exactly do you mean by images per spiel?

The 126 and 110 style negatives were always cut into strips of four I think.

timmmay

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#590111 4-Mar-2012 09:49

Personally i'd outsource. In the US there are film scanning companies that do good prices, maybe there's a NZ company too. Be careful if you courier them anywhere, use sig required couriers.

lchiu7

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#601876 29-Mar-2012 12:35

I did my own since I needed to scan 35mm negatives, 35mm slides and APS cartridges. I just picked up a Canon film scanner and used that. That way I had full control over the image quality and which ones I wanted to actually keep.

But if you do that make sure you get a scanner that does at least 4000dpi so you extract as much quality from the negative you can.

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gzt

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#601882 29-Mar-2012 12:40

What was the average amount of time you needed to get it right, say per 5 images or so?

Was the included software good enough or did you rely on other capture software?

Thanks!

lchiu7

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#601887 29-Mar-2012 12:58

I was using Photoshop to scan at first since that's the best way. But the process took a while and during that time I upgraded my PC to Vista. Alas the SCSI Canon scanner I was using had no drivers for Vista so I was stuck for a while. I then discovered a software tool called Vuescan which supported the scanner,.

So I would just scan the negatives into TIFF format (lossless) which I only did once for each negative unless I saw lots of dirt or lint on the negative I hadn't noticed. I could then at my leisure,open up each image in Photoshop and make the appropriate corrections and save back in PSD (lossless)format.

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ObidiahSlope

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#601926 29-Mar-2012 14:04

If you have ImageMagick installed and if you use Linux you probably will, you can "convert" a negative image to a positive image.

Example (at the command line);

convert -negate origin.jpg output.jpg

Obsequious hypocrite

lchiu7

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#601927 29-Mar-2012 14:06

Photoshop does this fine as a standard function.

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