Scanning Negatives and Slides

[pendennis]

For several months, I've been looking at scanners. I have a lot of 35mm and medium format slides and negatives which I'd like to process. In the end, I went with the Epson Pro V850. The man in the "Brown Truck" delivered it, and it's now set up on my desk top platform which is used solely for editing and scanning.

I'm still in the embryonic stages of learning, and I've scanned both 35mm and medium format negatives and transparencies.

Over my desk, and for many years at my office, I've had the following picture framed. A lot of folks liked it, but I wasn't completely happy with the cropping of the image. Today, I scanned in the negative, and did a bit of editing in Adobe Elements v15. I was surprised at the amount of detail lost when the negative was printed. I lost a lot of detail because of the blowout caused by the highlights of the smoke. I'll probably have another print made directly from the scanned image. New life for a favorite image.

[Donald]

We don't know by whom you had it printed way back in the day, Dennis, but I am assuming it was just a regular High Street printing service. And you are right, by taking control of it yourself, you will most likely end up with a hugely superior print. Good luck with it. It certainly deserves to be treated well.

[Mike Buckley]

It certainly deserves to be treated well.

Amen to that!

[Shadowman]

Nice image.

[Cogito]

Good choice of scanner and a nice shot. Enjoy the time you're now going to spend scanning your negs/slides! It's probably worth it.

[marlunn]

Like the image, well worth a revisit and totally expect you to get a superior print from it by controlling the whole process.
This may or may not be of interest https://petapixel.com/2017/02/14/wet...lm-scans-home/

[Geoff F]

As Donald said, when I first started scanning my old negatives I realised that a lot of my previous poor quality results was down to the printing. When they started auto 'enhancing' my prints I decided that a move to digital was necessary. If I shot a grey sky and green sea I didn't want the print coming back as bright blue!

After several scanners over a few years I'm now using the Epson V800 which is working well.