Myths About Slide Scanning and Negative Scanning: Scanning Is Easy

Myth: Scanning is Easy

The manufacturers of scanning and computer hardware would have you believe that scanning slides and negatives is very easy to do. This isn't normally the case.

It would be great if all we had to do was drop film into a scanner, press a button and enjoy the resulting digital images. It doesn't work this way, however, no matter what scanner manufacturers tell you in their advertising material. In more than 90% of the negatives and slides that we scan here at Pixmonix, some amount of post-scan processing is required to achieve good results.

What does this post-scan processing involve? We use Adobe's professional photo editing tools. Most often, we use tools such as levels, curves, color balance, saturation, contrast, rotation and cropping adjustments. Less frequently, we make use of noise reduction, color restoration, hue, channels for black and white conversion, and other adjustments.

Learning to use these tools isn't terribly hard. There are literally hundreds of books and videos to help in the learning process. This learning, however, does take time and energy and may cost some money to buy books or videos.

Having a strong understanding of a large number of tools allow you to accurately and efficiently apply the correct tools to each image. Without knowledge of a wide array of tools and a good deal of experience - even if you already are familiar with digital imaging tools - you will spend a large amount of time adjusting every image.

Here are two examples of unprocessed (i.e., raw mages from the scanner) and adjusted (i.e., after our post-scan processing steps) images, along with a list of the adjustments made to each. These images are typical of the images that we see every day. We commonly must make adjustments as shown for these example images; these are not unusual, outstanding, or complicated images requiring unusual processing work.

		Color slide	cropping rotation restoration of color (ROC) color balance black point saturation (color selective) hue (color selective) sharpness highlight recovery
		Color negative	cropping rotation color balance black and white point exposure curves saturation (color selective) highlight recovery noise/grain reduction sharpness
Raw images from the scanner (click for full-sized images 7.6MB, 49MB)	Images following adjustment (click for full-sized images 8.4MB, 5.0MB)	Film Source	Adjustments performed

As you can see, a long list of corrections was necessary to move from the raw image files created by the scanner and scanning software to a "finished" image. Doing these corrections consistently and efficiently requires extensive experience doing the adjustments on a wide variety of films. Without this experience, you are likely to spend a great deal of time on the effort - and you may not achieve good results.