Photo scanning

Your slides cannot remain in their original format without losing contrast and color over time. This would drastically affect the quality of your pictures when you view them on a projector. The perfect way to protect your precious pictures is to convert your slides to digital format.

Slides Scanner

You might want to consider a good quality photo scanner to convert your slides to digital format. This is because such scanners got the capability of scanning several different slides at once, which you can save in separate files. Doing this will save you both time and effort. You could then forward your scanned slides to your friends and associates via email. You could also enhance the brightness of the slides and repair any problems with the images before you scan the slides.

Scan Format

When you want to convert your slides to digital format and keep an archive of your slide images in photographic form, then the best format to use would be the Tagged Image Format. Commonly known as tif, an image file with a tif extension to it is probably of high quality. You can view very precise images of your slides using a tif format.

If you’re not particular about some loss of quality then you may want to convert your slides to the jpg or jpeg format. The compression algorithm of the jpg file creates much smaller file sizes compared to the tif format. It’s a very popular format for sharing photos on the web and for emailing to friends and associates.

Although the loss of quality in a jpg format is considered quite small when compared to the tif, however this loss of quality becomes significant when you want to modify the pictures onscreen and re-save them. This becomes particularly important when your slides are old, faded or otherwise damaged. As you keep saving the jpg file after each modification, more quality will be lost. Therefore you might want to convert your slides to digital format as tif files instead of jpg files.

Editing Your Scans

If you want to edit photos from the tif format, make a copy and work on the copy instead of the original scanned slides. You should not work on your original scan in order to have one good image of your original slide especially if it has special significance to you. You can then use a photo editing software to edit copies of your scanned slides, touch up the faded sections, add more color and enhance the image onscreen. This is what’s called air brushing the slides that you’ve converted to digital format. The pictures will look especially attractive once you’ve touched them up.

When you want to preserve the images on your slides, you should convert your slides to digital format. You will be able to view your slides onscreen and print them out to mount on frames. You can edit your slides and enhance the images that you could share with your loved ones over the internet!

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