Scanning disapointment - advice please

[Weslake-Monza]

The initial message was deleted from this topic on 25 September 2012 at 21:14

[davepoth]

It's difficult to get the settings just right - and most commercial companies won't fiddle about with the colour balance and brightness on every single photo for you. You can always fix them yourself though, it's pretty easy.

[Simpo Two]

Weslake-Monza said:

Unfortunately while the scans are good quality the colour and brightness doesn't appear correct to me.

So, is the problem one of scanning old 35mm negatives? Should I have had the prints scanned instead?

Or is the problem that the scanning isn't as good as that used when the original prints were produced?

In theory negatives should be able to give better results as a print made from them has lost a generation (think RAW vs JPG). However colour negatives have an orange colour base and (in my limited experience of trying such things) not all software copes with this perfectly. The original prints would have been made not by scanning but optically.

I think also that old negatives are not going to give the perfection that we are used to in these digital days without a deal of post-processing.

[LongQ]

There are places that will take on the task of making the scannned negative look 'right' and work to your instructions about how you want it to look. However, this sort of service does not come cheap.

To put that statement another way ...

If you had, say, about 10 favourite shots that you really wanted to reproduce to your own vision of what was required you might well be better off buying a scanner and advanced scanning software and doing it yourself.

However is the results you have mostly look a bit 'flat' you may be able to work wonders in an editor playing with levels and possibly doing so on a colour by colour basis. But be honest with yourself about the potential of the originals or you could spend hours chasing an unrealisable dream.