How to Digitize Your Photo Negatives

Photo negatives, like many other physical photo formats, have become somewhat outdated in recent years. Though today people only use this format on rare occasions, many still possess an abundance of photo prints and negatives. As with any physical object, photo negatives will deteriorate with age and exposure to outside elements, such as air, water and heat. This will cause the images captured within to become lost to the years. Understanding how to digitize your photo negatives will eradicate these risks of damage and will help you preserve your most precious memories for many years to come.

Media selection

The first step in understanding how to digitize your photo negatives is selecting the best negatives for digitization. Some negatives will yield better results than others and, as the digitization process can sometimes be quite lengthy, it is best to organize your negatives first to ensure the best results. When choosing the best negatives for digitization, try to choose slides that are in focus and have good light exposure. Negatives that are blurry or improperly exposed will yield poor results when digitized. Negatives are quite small and appear rather dark on the film reel, so it can be a bit difficult to ascertain which slides are best for digitization. To get a clearer view of the slides at hand, hold each slide up to a light source to better illuminate the image. Be sure not to hold the slide too close to the light source, as extreme light exposure may slightly compromise the slide. Holding the slide against a more indirect light, such as that of the sun or a distant lamp, will provide you with ample light to see the images without inducing damage to the slide.

Image orientation

Once you select which slides will make the cut, you can begin preparing the images for scanning and digitization. To ensure that the images scan and digitize correctly, you must pay special attention to the orientation of the slide itself. Slides oriented incorrectly in the scanner will appear incorrectly when digitized. For instance, the image may appear upside down, flipped left to right, or a combination of the two. While this may not seem too important, it can be quite significant for images that display writing or iconic images. Ensuring proper slide orientation is crucial to represent the images and events exactly as they were when someone first took the photo.

Scanning

Finally, you can scan and store the slides in a digital format. There are several different types of scanners typically used to digitize photo negatives. The most common scanners are flatbed scanners and negative scanners. Negative scanners are exclusively for the digitization of negative prints and can accommodate mounted slides and negative film reels. Flatbed scanners, on the other hand, can accommodate a larger range of physical photo formats, including photo prints, negative film reels, and mounted slides.

Types of Negatives

There are several types of negatives with the most popular being 35mm. Medium format negatives and transparencies, created from 120 or 220 film, are another type. Large format negatives and transparencies are typically 4x5 or 8x10 in size. A professional digitization studio like DiJiFi can provide you with high quality digital scans of your negatives, they can provide color correction to bring them back to life and their expert staff will take excellent care of your media especially if they are older and delicate.