How to Save Your Sanity When Scanning 35mm Slides to Digital

Scanning 35mm slides is not typically at the top of our to-do list, but it should be. Most of us have some, perhaps even thousands, of old 35mm slides tucked away in our attic, garage or closet. Back in the day, slides were a common way to take and share pictures. Watching slideshows of summer getaways to national parks and beaches was a favorite pastime; the old-time projectors and screens were the precursor to today's photo-sharing methods.

Unfortunately, today many old slides are accumulating dust, fading and changing color. Gradually slides could get darker and develop a blue tone or colors will lighten and become a little pink. That's not exactly appealing and it likely will continue unless you do something. Luckily, scanning old 35mm slides, negatives and paper pictures they will have a new lease on life and will be protected from more damage, and you can show them off to your children and grandchildren.

35mm Slide Scanning At Home

We've established that scanning 35mm slides to digital is necessary to keep them from deteriorating, but do you want to do it on your own or would it make sense to use a service? Consider that you want to scan around 500 or so slides and want them to look good: you will have to get a decent scanner. Good quality flat-bed scanners run around two hundred bucks. A professional quality 35mm scanner such as the Nikon Coolscan 5000ED will set you back about $1500. That stings! Plus, what do you do when your slides are fading or the colors have changed, or they're scratched? Then you need to color-correct each slide using software such as Photoshop. This involves an additional expenditure for image editing software (Photoshop is costly at about $600+) and you need to know how to make the corrections -- plus be ready to spend about 30-40 hours.

How Using a Slide Scanning Service Makes the Process Easy

A considerably faster and simpler way that may reduce your costs and will certainly save you time, is to utilize a slide scanning service. Besides scanning 35mm slides to digital, companies will scan paper prints and transparencies as well. Basically you only need to gather your photos and slides and ship them in a box to the photo service. The best part is they will clean your slides and photos of any dust and remove scratches and minor blemishes. Once they’ve converted the 35mm slides and images to digital, they will even do things like cropping, red-eye removal and make color corrections, getting your pictures as close to the original state as possible. Think about it: the fun images of your mom in her powder blue felt '50s skirt will be restored to the way they were meant to be.

Your Images Will Be Available on DVD

After your slides and photos have been scanned the originals will be sent back to you with a DVD of your new digital images. At this point you can get creative with you new photos. In addition to the joy of cleaning out some of the clutter in your garage, you'll be able to rearrange the pictures, make more DVD's to give to your family, make photobooks, and share them online.

While scanning 35mm slides to digital format does take a bit of effort, you will be assured that your old family pictures will have an extended life, safe from the deterioration of time.

Valerie Goettsch is webmaster of Digital Photos 101 a resource for photo enthusiasts with reviews of digital cameras and the latest photo services and software. Click here more information on scanning 35mm slides to digital.