Article Written By: Jennifer Hoskins
Preserving 35mm slides or really any traditional slides which were produced years ago is one of the most difficult jobs. In order that they don't get exposed and damaged, you probably have stacked them all in a store room. However, this is really unnecessary today what with modern slide scanning services using advanced techniques to scan them into digital formats which are of high quality.As is the case with video and music photos too are better stored in digital formats for longevity. This is exactly what scanning services today do. Once scanned into digital formats, your slides can then be stored anywhere you want such as your home computer, a flash drive or even your smartphone. All this has become possible due to the advances in scanning techniques over the last decade or two.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 is an uncompressed image file format which preserves the quality of your slide and reproduces exactly the same image. If you want to archive photos on to a large hard disk, this is the better choice. That is because the PNG files occupy a large amount of space as compared to the other formats. This shouldn't be a problem since Terabyte storage disks are much cheaper 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.Now, if you cannot clean the slides completely, you don't need to despair. You can find many images editing software that will help you remove the dirt specs from the pictures once you have stored them on your computer. Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro are the most popular image manipulating software around. If you are looking for some free software alternatives, try GIMP.Finally, you might be thinking whether to slide all those slides at home using your home scanner or to get the job done from slide scanning services. The right answer would depend on how many slides you want to convert and whether the scanner you have is good enough to scan those slides into high quality image files.If you want to be sure that your slides are scanned into the best possible photos, handing the job over to a professional scanning service is better. Firstly, they are more likely to have high end professional equipment which is much better than the average scanner. Secondly, it will turn out to be much cheaper to have them scan for you.
This Article Has Been Published on Sat, 2 Apr 2011 and Read 277 Times