how to scan color negatives with vuescan

Both the color negatives and slides are on a wide variety of brands of films and different types of films even of the same brand. My objective was and remains to digitize my collection of analog photographs of some 20 to 25 odd thousand individual frames, on both color negatives and color slides. While I have used commercial scanning of slides to digital images, the current price of that for me locally is around US$2 per slide, for medium resolution TIF files, not what I wanted for archival storage, and given the number of analog images, a very costly solution. Whether true or not, it set my expectation that a scanner needed to be able to extract about that level or detail to “justify” the switching of my “important” images from analog to digital format. In an old article in Modern Photography, I came across a comparison of the analog film to digital images, where the key point for me was that a Kodachrome slide equated to a digital image of around 18 megapixels. Initially, scanners that were available had limited capability. Simply put, with age I value the family color negative photographs more than the artistic slides.įor about 20 years I had the intention to digitize some, but preferably all, of my stored photographs. My long ago objective was to retain the slide medium for my “important” pictures, but the shift to color negative made most of the negative color pictures important beyond the original intention. At some stage, I switched to color negative for family related pictures.

The bulk of my “serious” photographs are in slide format, but a disproportionate number of the color negative photographs are of high emotional value. Before switching completely to digital cameras around 10 years ago, I had accumulated a slide collection of some 10-15000 slides, about 10000 photographs taken on color negative film, and a much smaller collection on different types of black and white films.

I would describe myself as a knowledgeable amateur photographer but by no means a semi-professional or a highly prolific photographer. I have been photographing various things and events for around 40 years. This two-part article will put the average film photographer in a position to scan their film based collection of images to computer. The process of scanning analog (film) images to digital (computer) images can be complex and daunting, and the technical details involved can also be challenging and off-putting.

The aim of this article is to assist people with a large collection of negatives and slides to convert that to digital images. Facebook Tweet Vue-Scan Scren shot Abstract:

How to scan color negatives with vuescan