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| Digitizing Photos |
We went digital in 2004 for a 5-month sabbatical trip of Kate's to Australia and New Zealand (see blog entries for that year). The year before we had been in Australia for a month and had came back with 60 rolls of 35mm slide film — Kate convinced me that we weren't going to cart around a suit case full of film on the much longer 2004 trip. As you can imagine we have a lot of photos from before and after that digital divide.
Some friends have asked for my advice on how best to digitize their collection of old photos. For example, here's what Leslie asked:
"I need some advice from someone who has experience digitizing old photo negatives. Can I use my regular printer/scanner for this task or is a special scanner required? What is the software that you use to create a photo from the negative? This is a task I should have started months, or years, ago, but better to get at it sooner rather than later."
Some of what follows is my advice to Leslie or anyone else who is interested. It's an attempt to summarize my experience and guide yours. If my context and goals are nothing like yours then this advice isn't relevant. So, before I start, here's a bit of background.
Background: before you start
You need to understand where my advice comes from. I am an "advanced" amateur photographer and have been taking pictures for the last 50 or so years. Most of my pre-digital work has been with 35mm SLR cameras — mostly advanced amateur Canon equipment. During that period I took a lot of slides, especially on trips and vacations. We also have a collection of black and white as well as color negatives. For a time Kate and I did some dark room work at our home, e.g., we developed our wedding photos in the kitchen of our apartment (35mm E-6 color slides which we had wound onto cassettes). Our friend, my classmate, Neil Farnsworth was the wedding photographer. But we were never very good or comfortable in the darkroom.
As mentioned we went digital in 2004. But taking digital photos is one thing, working with them is quite another. Some may have treated digital photography as just another means of getting prints from their local lab. And, while we still print physical albums, my goal has always been to show and share my photos in computer albums. I.e., to make digital "slide shows" that could be presented to and shared with others. As such I've been finding the tools I need to organize, edit and display photos for others to see. Having photos squirreled away on your computer isn't much different from having photo albums in the basement — they're not readily shareable. And, they're not readily searchable. That's a virtue of on-line photo albums.
These days I use Corel Paintshop Pro to edit my photos on my computer. Others recommend Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom — I've not used either of those. I sometimes use the photo editing tools that come with Windows 10. They're good and work well but are limited in what they can do. I believe, for example, that the Windows 10 Photos editor cannot convert negatives (from black and white or color film) to positive images. If you do much work with digitizing old photos you'll soon discover that you'll need an good photo editor to deal with scratches, dust and other photo flaws. But on the other hand photo editors like Paintshop Pro can be overly complex and burdensome to learn.
All of my photos are uploaded into the Google cloud where they're tagged, sorted and organized into albums with Google Photos. Some of the tagging and organizing is my work, some is done automatically by Google. I can access my Google Photos from pretty much any device. And I can do minor photo edits there as well. Google Photos will archive photos at 16MP for free (and down size your photos automatically to that size if needed) and that's adequate for most of my needs (they're changing the policy on that come June of 2021).
I also archive my photos locally on a 2TB hard disk and, as a backup to that, I also save them on SD cards (the same cards I use in my cameras). These days you can buy very large SD cards at a reasonable price. I used to archive onto CD and DVD but these days they're too small and, I fear, not very permanent.
If you're going to be working with digital photos you're going to need a photo editor and a photo filing system. I'd recommend you start with the native Windows tools and progress to the professional editors as needs become apparent — e.g. for me one of the pressing needs was to be able to fix perspective problems on photos of artwork, buildings, etc.
I really like storing my photos with Google. Others use Amazon Prime, still others use the Apple iCloud, and no doubt there are many more. All of these cloud services are good places to archive your photos and provide good tools to tag, search and organize your photos.
My Advice
Given that background, here's a summary of what I have done and continue to do to digitize old photos. It's very much a rabbit hole of technologies and software but here goes...
- If you've only got a few photos, slides or negatives pay the money and take them to a photography shop and have them digitize the photos for you. I have done this, with mixed results. Alternatively, if you have a friend who digitizes their work perhaps you can persuade them to scan your photos. I have done this for friends, but I'm not looking to make more friends. So don't ask me unless you are already a very good friend and only have a very few pictures to digitize!
- If you want to digitize old photos you can take pictures of them with your camera or cell phone ... but watch out for reflections, light source and camera shake. You'll need some device, a tripod or copy stand, to hold the camera steady. This is the poor man's solution and produces poor man results. I've done this early on and was happy with the results at the time.
Flat Bed Scanner - However, I recommend a flat bed scanner for old photos. I'm currently using an Epson V600 scanner which will also scan slides and negatives. We also have an "all in one printer/scanner" which we travel with (we won it on a draw at the supermarket). You don't need an expensive scanner for old photos. There are lots, new and used, available at very modest prices.
- But Beware: the perennial problem with scanners, any device which attaches to your computer, is the software drivers. There's lots of old scanners which worked very well but are no longer supported on current computer systems. You'll find that there is only one solution for that: I use Vuescan from Hamrick as my scanning software — I have the professional edition which works with all of my scanners and I can use my Epson V600 flat bed scanner for slides and negatives. But also beware: I have a very old Dimage II slide/film scanner which I purchased used in 2005 when I scanned our wedding photos. I can no longer get it to work even with Vuescan! Sadly, all technology becomes an obsolete door stop at some point so if you shop on the used market by careful about what you buy.
- Not all flat bed scanners are capable of scanning slides and negatives. Scanners work by reflecting light off the image under the lid. For slides and negatives you need to project light through the slide or negative. My Epson V600 scanner does that (there's a light source in the lid), my "all in one scanner" does not. I have tried, and have had no luck, to project a light source through slides and negatives on a flatbed scanner that doesn't have a light source in the lid.
- My Epson V600 flat bed scanner will scan slides and negatives at an incredible density (at 6400dpi scan rate you get an image over 60MP!) should you have an image worth preserving at that detail. I usually scan at 3200dpi which produces an image of about 15MP which is more than enough for my needs. However, the big problem with flat bed scanners is they are incredibly slow, especially if you're trying for higher resolution. If you have a handful of negatives they're great; but, if you've got boxes and boxes of slides and negatives, they're prohibitively slow. I have two solutions for quickly scanning slides and negatives.
Stand Alone Scanner - Quick Solution No. 1: After much research I bought a Kodak Slide N Scan stand alone film and slide scanner on Amazon. There are a few stand alone device available to scan film and slides but the market seems to be drying up. The virtue of these devices is you don't have to worry about drivers as you needn't connect them to your computer. Instead, I scan onto a memory card (the same cards that fit my cameras) and "sneaker net" the pictures to my computer. I.e., I take the card out of the scanner and plug it into my computer! This scanner advertises that it scans at 22MP but really it scans at 14MP and interpolates to get the higher resolution. Watch out for scanners that only scan at 5MP (that's very low resolution). One virtue of this device is the large screen; you can see what you're going to get. Another is the ability to adjust exposure by several f-stops. The feeder mechanism is pretty slick which makes it easy to load images and scan quickly. One limitation of this device is that it only scans JPEGS. If you want raw format images this isn't for you. But it's good enough for me. I use this device to scan the majority of my images and they are good enough for viewing on a computer screen. If I need a better quality scan I use my flat bed scanner.
Macro Photography - Quick Solution No. 2: Before biting the bullet for the stand alone scanner I did a lot of scans using macro photography with my Canon SLR cameras. I have an old photographic enlarger which I use as a copy stand to hold my camera steady. Canon has some tethering software which connects the camera to my computer with a USB cable: so I can focus, adjust exposure, etc. without touching the camera and have the pictures automatically transferred to my computer. I bought a cheap tracing light table on Amazon as the light source (you can use your tablet or phone as a light source but you'll need to diffuse the light or have your film some distance from the light). You'll need to be able to do close up "macro" photography: I use extension tubes (very cheap), I have friends who have macro photography lenses (these tend to be expensive even on the used market). And you'll need to rig up something to position your slides/film over the light source and properly framed to fill your camera view finder. Once you've got that figured out you can quickly scan film/slides at the camera resolution (24MP on my Canon T6i) and in the image format your camera supports (e.g., Canon Raw Format). Beware: getting your film positioned at exactly the right distance for macro photography is awfully fussy. For me it worked best with my prime 50mm lens stopped down to f11 or more.
If your cell phone will do close focus/Macro that can work. But you need a copy stand and light source (a tablet or another phone will do but you need to defuse the light). There's YouTube build your own examples (e.g., DIY Cardboard Smartphone Film Scanner (v2)) and a little cardboard device you'll find on Amazon. Our cell phones won't get close enough for 35mm film so I've not done that.
An observation: buying a flat bed or film scanner that attaches to your computer can take you down the rabbit hole to software and photo editor hell... which can get very complicated and pricey. We bought a scanner device, scanner software to run the device (Vuescan) and a photo editor (Paintshop Pro) to clean up the images. Avoid that path unless you want to become a digital photo geek.
Finally. All of these old photos are interesting to see again and some of them are quite good photos. But many are out of focus, poor exposure, poor composition, etc. But then I've always said that if you want to take a lot of good pictures, you have to take a lot of bad ones to get there. Sharing these old photos with friends has been a great joy for us.
P.s. Of course you're going to need a good computer. I'm using a laptop but last year, at Christmas, upgraded to a larger screen, topped out the memory to 16GB and replaced the hard disk with a 1TB SSD (solid state device). Work flows go much quicker now. That's another path in the rabbit hole.
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