Photo, Slide, And Negative Scanning

[Arik Paran]

For years, people have been taking film photos and film slides and storing the negatives when they wanted to remember family events. Even though digital cameras are all the rage now, in many cases, people are still using film as their primary way to save memories for later viewing. But, film presents a few problems in the way of storage and durability. Over time, film loses it's flexibility - it gets brittle and cracks or breaks. The film media also doesn't age very well: those beautiful, true-to-life colors eventually fade or turn red. Storage can present a problem, too, because over the years, people accumulate more and more shoe boxes full of photos, slides, and negatives. Pretty soon, you end up with a designated closet in one room of the house and these precious memories get consigned to the shelves, never to be seen again. Wouldn't it be great if you could preserve those old photos and slides and save the negatives for future reprints? That's where photo, slide, and negative scanning comes in!

Arik Paran of Digital Pickle, a photo and video preservation company, notes that photo, slide, and negative scanning can not only preserve your family memories, it can also improve them. Digital Pickle technicians spend time with each individual photo, slide, and negative, scanning and retouching them into a computer format that ensures ideal exposure, focus, color fidelity, cropping, and orientation. Before they scan your negative or photo, Digital Pickle carefully cleans your materials with filtered compressed air. For color images, they use Digital Ice, a sophisticated Kodak optical technology that virtually "sees through" all dust and scratches to produce an almost flawless digital image. Normally, the process of scanning involves capturing color information using red, green, and blue channels (RGB). With Digital Ice, the scanner beams an infrared light that passes through the film's emulsion, but gets blocked by dust, scratches, and other defects. This fourth channel generates a defect mask that enables the scanner to repair the image locally instead of applying global changes that blur the image (typical software fix). The process does not affect the film in any way.

Having photo, slide, and negative scanning to digital done means the new digital images store easily on a CD or DVD, eliminating those taped-together shoeboxes that currently house your treasured pictures. A CD can store up to 500 images and a DVD can store up to 4,000 images, which will free up a lot of space in your closet. And, once they are a digital format, it's as easy as pressing a button to get high-quality photo reprints for friends and family. You can create photobooks and can share images with Cousin Bob and the rest of the family all across the country. You can even have Digital Pickle produce a poster-sized image of Grandma for her next birthday party!

Those old photos, slides, and negatives aren't aging very well, which means they are fading in that shoe box on the shelf by the minute. Don't let those precious pictures or slides of Mom and Dad's wedding or negatives of Great-Grandpa holding Mom as a baby turn into piles of brittle, unusable pieces of rubbish. Preserve those memories through photo, slide, and negative scanning so they will last a lifetime and beyond.

For more information about photo, slide, and negative scanning, or to ask about our photo, slide, and negative scanning services, contact Digital Pickle at 1-800-889-0730 or email them today.