Photographic print scanning

We believe there are two main reasons for scanning photographs..

Preserving: The first is to preserve your images and memories. Digital files do not age like physical media. Photos can fade, get scratched, pick up dirt, bend or generally suffer from being kept in boxes. As a rule, they may have no backup as most people will not know where the negatives are! Digital files can have backups and do not suffer from the same problems of aging. That is why we supply all our images as .TIF format. It’s bigger than a JPG but it does not suffer from compression problems like a .jpg file can. We also supply full size .JPG files suitable for standard 300dpi printing.

Viewing: The second is that your images rarely come out of the box or album for viewing. Most of the time they are gathering dust. We supplyr 4K sized .JPGs as well as the printable versions for viewing on PCs, phones, tablets or a modern large screen smart TVs. Far easier than searching for and pulling the albums out from cupboards. Probably not as exciting if you enjoy rooting about but viewed more easily and often by everyone.

We also can restore damaged prints, which you can read about here.

What we do…

On receipt of your prints we will examine them under a klupe and strong light..

Anything that is unscannable will be identified. If it is possible to rescue a slide that is badly damaged, we will quote on our “Restoration” service.

The print will be cleaned using brushes and air blowers prior to scanning.

We scan prints using professional scanners from Epson. General printing required 300dpi but we can up to 1200dpi to get every bit of detail we can.

We use class leading Lasersoft software in the scanning process for removal of blemishes and colour restoration. This is very sensitive software and it can be a problem is used at too high a setting. So we do not rely on it alone. We use it t a medium setting only. That retains fine detail in the image that could otherwise be lost.

We do a colour matching of the file by comparing our calibrated screen image with the original print.

We aim to match the originals colour however when the colour has degraded, we do this to the most natural look we can achieve.

We return the master file to you as a large TIF for archiving, a full-size JPG for printing and a 4K sizes JPG for viewing on TV, computer or use in social media.

Our price list for slide scanning services can be found here.