Scanning and processing old color negatives

[dannyp19]

Is this even possible? I have a scanner and CS3.

Can anybody lead me in the right direction?

I have tons of negatives from the old film days. I didnt go digital until 2002 and a lot of the original pics are faded, creased, etc.

My main goal is to digitize our old wedding negatives and make an album. Those negatives are 24 years old but were stored better than the processed photos!

[Murtasma]

What scanner do you not all scanners can scan film properly.

[Jim Bryant]

You need to get a negative scanner. Nikon makes the cool scans and Canon makes the Canonscan series. I have the Canonscan FS4000US. I can scan 35mm B & W and color negs as well as slides. Most of the flat bed scanners won't scan a negative unless it's one of those combo flatbed/neg scanners. I'd pretty much stay away from those.

[glyphon]

There are various techniques that can be used to scan negatives/slides on a flatbed scanner, but a dedicated film/slide scanner will almost always produce much higher quality scans.

[Arun]

Possible to do like others have said however it can be very time consumming. I have done it and it was taking me 3-4 mins per slide just to scan. May be worthwile looking at getting them done in bulk somewhere

[superdewa]

I am in the process of scanning all my parents' slides from when I was a child. I have nearly a thousand slides and then I will start on whatever negatives and prints they can dig up.

My big motivation is to get these out of my parents' basement and onto a website where my whole family can enjoy them and also to have a back-up of every one of these photos before they disintegrate into the dust. I am not looking for super-high-quality, although there may be a few at the end that I will decide to take further.

I am using the Canon CanoScan 4400F (note that it's CanoScan, not CanonScan), which scans just four slides at a time and takes a few minutes to deal with each batch. This works fine for me (I'm not in a hurry). The scanner was under $100 and does a more than adequate job for what I want. I did a little research,and this one was highly rated for the investment.

If I want super-high quality scans of some of these later, I will probably send those individual slides off to be scanned rather than invest in an expensive scanner for myself -- It would be more cost effective for me that way.

One reason I don't mind the slowness of this is that I realized that if I were sending them off to be scanned, I would have to sort through them anyway (take out the not-so-great ones so as to save money), and it would take me almost as much time as just scanning them this way.

So, depending on what you want and how much money you have to spend, this might be an alternative for you.