Digitizing old Prints, Slides, and Negatives in 2022

[Minerve101]

Thought to share the approaches that have worked for me for scanning slides and prints.

I switched from film to digital in 2003. Before that, special occasions like a trip to Yellowstone were shot on Ektachrome slide film, which I developed myself. Most pictures were shot on ordinary color film printed at places like Fotomat or Target.

About 2008 I scanned those slides with a (now obsolete) Microtek flatbed scanner that shone light from a device on top of the slide into the scanner bed below. I scanned those at 2400 dpi, originally as TIFF files. I never pushed the limit to see the lowest resolution that would work. For a few favorites I still have those large TIFF files, but most were converted to jpegs with file size 6-8 MB.

For either sort of file a zoom to “200%” in Lightroom, shows no problem with pixelation, but the film grain becomes very coarse. Here is a sample you could see larger on Flickr.

Jackson Lake clouds by dfwatsoneuro, on Flickr


Just two weeks ago I started to scan some 3x5 and 4x6 prints from the 1980s. I am using a rather old Canon Pixma MG6300 multifunction device. So far I am scanning to TIFF files with resolution 600 dpi.

These files seem fine for post processing, though I have only worked on a few so far. No pixelation problems on a 4K 27-inch screen, even if image size is taken to 16x24 at 240 dpi in Photoshop. I have not actually printed any of these yet. Most future viewing will be on an iPad or Surface tablet, not a large print. Another sample.

Xmas 1988 by dfwatsoneuro, on Flickr (OOPS, this was actually 1987!)


I could see that using a camera and stand could produce images that permit even greater enlargement/ cropping. I felt that getting the perfectly even lighting without any reflection from the glossy prints would be too hard to make that setup attractive to me.

The scanning process is not fast, but the actual time scanning is only a little more than the time taking photos out of the album and then replacing them.