Advantages and Disadvantages of Slide and Photography Scanning

You may be considering slide and photography scanning but you have many slides and photos, so you aren’t sure whether to scan your slides or your photos.

This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of slide and photography scanning. Let’s jump into the article…

Advantages of Slide Scanning

These are the main advantages of slide scanning:

• Slide scanning captures light being projected through a translucent piece of film. This means that you will capture a higher dynamic range from dark to light portions
• Errors with the original photo can be amplified if the print copy was made with the photo laboratory enlarger improperly focused. Also, any poor processing decisions made at the time of printing making may affect overall print image quality.
• There is no need to get prints made of the negatives, so you can just send the slides to be scanned

Disadvantages of Slide Scanning

These are the main disadvantages of slide scanning:

• Although slides have more detail, this could lead to more imperfections which may have been corrected by the photo lab when printing
• If your slides are not organized, then you will take a long time to order them as each needs to be magnified. However, once scanned they can always be organized into any order required.
• There are likely to be several versions of the same shot and each of the slides need to be reviewed.
• Slide scanning is slow when compared to modern print scanning, even with good equipment
• Slides need to be scanned at a much higher stated resolution, than with print scanning, to get similar results in terms of file size and pixel count.

Examples of cases where it may be preferable to use slide scanning

• You do not have prints of your photos available, or the prints are damaged.
• The slide images may not be able to view due to projection equipment becoming more and more difficult to come by so scanning is the only way to see the images once again.
• You are going to do a lot of close cropping in on very small objects in the photos
• There are extremely subtle details in the shadows or highlights of a slide that are very important to preserve.

Advantages of Photo Print Scanning

• There will be less post-processing (such as color and exposure adjustments) to make your scans look like they do in your original albums.
• If you are working with photos that have been processed to have a particular look, scanning the print instead of the slide will preserve the look
• Photo print scanning is less complicated but for the best detail and time-saving then commercial scanners are recommended.
• Unlike slide scanning, the original is large enough that you can clearly see what you are scanning, and the condition of the photo, at first sight
• You cannot share a physical slide featuring several people with all those in the image. You can share a scanned slide image.

Disadvantages of Photo Print Scanning

• Your originals were cropped from the negatives at the photo lab
• Any mistakes made by photo labs improperly enlarging the original prints will be carried through into your scans. You will need additional editing work to correct these mistakes
• Any tears or creases in the photos will now appear in the scan.

Examples of cases where it may be preferable to use photo scanning

• You have thousands of photos that you want to be scanned
• You want to get high-quality copies of the photos scanned quicker
• You do not have the negatives or they are damaged
• The photos are fading and are becoming damaged.
• The photos are taking up a lot of space.
• You cannot share a physical photo featuring several people with all those in the image. You can share a scanned photo image.
• You’re more of a photo archivist than a Photoshop expert

Final word:

Now that you have divided which Slide and Photography Scanning to make, you can make your photo and slide scanning order here.