Pixmonix
News and Information
Trips to the beach. Hikes in the mountains. Traveling with family and friends. So many of our fondest memories are tied to the summer season. I will bet that many of you have boxes of slides and negatives full of great summer memories from your childhood (or from when your kids were small) that would be great to bring back to life and share. Let us help! Stay cool! Steve Bennett |
Summer is in full swing! |
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Tell-a-friend and Win! Your friends can get you free scans! Each time you Tell-a-Friend about Pixmonix from now until August 31, 2006 you are entered to win a chance at 50 free scans. The more invitations that you send, the more chances you have to win. You will also earn free scans for each friend who places a qualified order. * |
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Great! You finally scanned all of dad's slides from when you were a kid. Job well done! Or is it? How are you storing those slides? You should take a bit of time to store them properly now so that they will still be around years from now. Here are some tips. Film hates moisture, heat and light. Moisture and heat can break down film materials and promote the growth of fungus and mildew that may eat away at the film emulsion and destroy paperboard slide mounts. To reduce the risk of damage films should ideally be stored in a cool, dry environment. Color films ideally are stored at 50°F or lower. B&W films are a bit more forgiving; they should be stored at about 70°F. All films should be stored in metal enclosures, if possible. This minimizes the effect of emissions from deteriorating wood or paperboard and the lacquer, dye or paint that may have been used. Film should be stored at low humidity, as higher humidity makes damage more probable, particularly from fungi. Many retailers sell polypropylene protective covers. These pages are an effective way to minimize damage to your slides or negatives. They are also convenient - they can be put into 3-ring binder boxes for easy access and protection from light and dust. You should minimize handling and removal from the covers and cases, since this can lead to scratching. You should invest in a pair of cotton film gloves to wear while putting your films into storage (to prevent getting dirt and fingerprints onto the films). A can of compressed air can be used to remove loose dust and dirt. Storage of slides is generally easier than negatives. Like negatives, there are binder pages available for storage. But the easier way to store these films is in archival cases made of paperboard or, ideally, metal (such as those from Logan). They are not very expensive, they protect slides very well, they are incredibly easy to use, and they take up far less space than those old carousels that you have been storing the slides in for years. Here are sources of information on archival storage of films:
Questions or comments? Please let us know at contact.php. |
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Perhaps you shot an image on your digital camera in portrait format. Or you scanned a photo on your flatbed but had to rotate it on the bed to make it fit. Whatever the cause, your digital image just is not oriented the right direction. As you have probably noticed already, there are two common ways rectangular images can be oriented. One way is with the camera horizontal, held normally. This is referred to as "landscape" orientation. The other is with the camera twisted 90 degrees. This is referred to as "portrait" orientation. Landscape images look like a piece of paper oriented with the 11 inch sides on the top and bottom, and portrait images look like a piece of paper with the 11 inch sides on the sides. When the computer receives a digital image, on the other hand, it sometimes can display images wrong (depending on the information inside the digital image file telling the computer how to orient the image). This can cause some images to come out rotated. So how do can you fix that?
Always remember: when editing images do not edit your only copy. Make a copy of your image before editing so that if you make errors you can revert to a backup and your image is not lost. Questions on these procedures? Please let us know at contact.php. |
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If you have shopped for either a scanner or a scanning service, chance are good that you have stumbled onto mention of a mysterious piece of techno babble: "bit depth" What is bit depth anyway? "Bit depth" refers to the number of bits a computer uses to represent each pixel of an image in order to determine color. Most images are called "8-bit" images because each channel (red, green, and blue) of each pixel is described by an 8-bit number. Because a bit can be either "on" or "off", a 1 or a 0, each channel can have up to 256 different shades. This gives a grand total of 16 million different combinations when we look at all 3 channels. Sometimes 3-channel 8-bit (red, green, and blue) is called 24-bit color because each channel has 8 bits (and 3 times 8 is 24). It can also be called "true color" because the 16 million colors so accurately represents the colors seen in the outside world. The human eye generally can't distinguish more than that amount. 24-bit color digital images are what we see everyday in "normal" images we view on the web and those that come out of most digital cameras (high end cameras excluded). Images with a higher bit depth may store more than 256 color shades for each channel. For example, 16-bit images have 65,536 different shades per color channel -- 256 times more data than is in the 8-bit image. The higher bit depth does not increase the overall resolution of the image; the same number of pixels is present in the image. Rather, each pixel can more finely distinguish colors that are very close together. For most images, higher bit depth rarely has a noticeable effect on the image, but it can have a dramatic increase the file size. Not all photo editing and viewing programs understand higher bit-depth images (though this is changing). Additionally, most photo printing services will not work with anything other than 24-bit (standard bit depth) images. So why have higher bit depth images? The major advantage to including higher bit depth to your image is that when using photo-editing techniques there is more data with which to work. When editing photos, you can never add data (i.e., detail) to the image, only take it away. High-bit depth images have more data to "throw away" when editing without the loss becoming noticeable. Many times these "problems" can only be made obvious with aggressive modification of the digital images (though there are examples where very simple changes cause problems). Frequently, problems with heavy editing manifest themselves when banding (the technical term for rough color transitions) appears in broad areas of roughly uniform color, for example in the blue sky. If you have had us scan your film or negatives, you may have noticed that we normally scan images at 8 bits per channel. Why not scan at a higher bit depth? For most of our customers and for most uses of the resulting images, scanning at higher bit depth does not increase image quality, but it does increase scanning costs and makes the resulting digital files much more cumbersome to handle because of their size and because of problems using the resulting images with some photo editing and viewing programs. We can do scans at 16 bits per channel if you have a need - just ask! Questions or comments? Please let us know at contact.php. |
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We have added a number of new scanning services in the past few months. We now offer scanning of 126 and 127 format slides. We scan the full image area of these film formats, which are slightly larger than 35mm. These slide mounts are physically the same size as 35mm slides, but the film area is larger. This larger area can't be scanned with "normal" 35mm scanners. Hence we use scanners normally used to scan medium format films to capture the full image area. We can still scan these images on our "normal" scanners and save you a bit on the cost if the few millimeters at the top and bottom of your images can be lost. Additionally, we now offer scanning of 120 format slides and negatives using medium format film scanners. These films produce wonderful digital images because the film area is so large! Scanning of 126, 127 and 120 format films includes all the great service and features of our 35mm scanning, including dust and scratch removal, color and exposure correction, cropping, archive quality CDs and DVDs, contact sheets and fanatical customer service. |
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From now until August 31, 2006 you are invited to enter the promo code "HOT" on your Pixmonix order form to 10 free scans on an order of 60 scans or more. ** |
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*All Pixmonix members are eligible for the "Tell-a-Friend, win scans" promotion from August 1, 2006 until August 31, 2006. Each time you Tell-a-Friend about Pixmonix with a valid email address you are automatically entered to win the 50 free scan prize. One winner will be randomly selected on September 1, 2006. Details of our Tell-a-Friend program can be found at http://wwww.pixmonix.com/tellafriend.php. **The summer Newsletter special is not valid on orders placed prior to August 1, 2006 or after August 31, 2005 at 11PM PST. 60 scan minimum is determined after application of any free scans in your account. Limit one discounted order per customer. Should you have questions or need to contact us, please contact us on the web at contact.php. To remove your name from our email list please reply to this message and let us know. Rest assured that we respect your privacy and we will not share your email address with anyone nor will we deluge you with email. Please see our privacy.php for details of our privacy policy. |
Using your images:
Photoshop Tip of the Month:
When images are not rotated correctly, Adobe Photoshop (and nearly every other photo editor) provides an easy solution. If your image is portrait where it should be landscape (or vice versa) you will need to rotate it 90 degrees to the right or left. To do this, go to the "Image" menu, scroll down to the "Rotate Canvas" menu item, and click either "Rotate 90° CW" or "Rotate 90° CCW" (CW and CCW stand for clockwise and counterclockwise respectively.)
Sometimes an image is not just 90° off. When you have an image that is just a few degrees off, you can't fix it by rotating it 90°. Instead, you can use the "Arbitrary..." menu item under the same menus to rotate the image however you want. When you select that menu item it will bring up a dialog box. You can then insert any number into it and select CW or CCW and it will rotate your image that many degrees clockwise or counterclockwise. 
When you rotate an image by an amount other than a multiple of 90° the computer adds white space around the edges. Although you may want to keep this extra area, sometimes it is preferable to crop it off. Set a rectangular crop box just inside the white space on all four edges. Although you lose some image data this way, you also eliminate any extra white space around the image.
Scanning Technologies:
New at 
Summer Newsletter Special