Photos and negs; technical help needed

10 years ago

I am trying to get many old photographs copied to finish my Grandmother's albums and share with the rest of the family.

I took a few 1950s snapshots to one of those one-hour scanners and was disgusted with the results. I also have many photo negatives I would like to get printed.

Where would I take, or send, my negatives to be printed?

Where is a good place to have copies made, and enhanced, from old photographs where the negative is no longer available.

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Comments (6)

ravencajun Zone 8b TX
10 years ago
look in your area for a professional camera store that also does developing and printing. They have much more control of what turns out than just the run it through the machine one hour places.
Try the phone book if you have one or google for professional photo printing + your city and state name
for example when I put in
professional photo printing + Houston, TX
this is the first result
PhotoSource
Which would be a great option here.

you can do the same search for your city.
ntt_hou
10 years ago
If you have a lot and a lot of photos to do, you may want to purchase yourself a scanner specially made for photos. It scans your photos in high resolution. Some models also scan negative films. You can get a pretty good one for less than $180.

As for software to clean up your old photographs, there are some free download tools that you can use for general purposes.
http://en.softonic.com/s/old-photo-cleaning-software
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alisande
10 years ago
Ditto ntt_hou. I bought myself a good scanner several years ago and have been working my way through my dad's extensive collection of photographs, mostly in negatives. The quality is wonderful, and I'm so glad I did this.

Here's a recent example--me with my mom, 1944:

{{!gwi}}
susandail_m
10 years ago
That photo turned out great. Can you share which scanner you bought? Thanks.
alisande
10 years ago
Sure. I bought the Canon Canoscan 9950F, but it isn't manufactured anymore. I paid around $400 for it, well worth it to me because it scans just about any size negative. My dad had several cameras, producing negatives of various sizes. I don't know why they stopped making it. It can be found used or refurbished on eBay, etc., but if you go that route make sure it comes with the mask, or template, or whatever it's called, for the different size negatives.

However, if you need to scan only 35mm negs, you can do that with the Canon Canoscan 9000F. Scanner prices have come down, and this looks like a nice one.

Here is a link that might be useful: Canoscan 9000F
dees_1
10 years ago
We have a Canon scanner too and the only use is for photos and negatives. I'm providing the link via Amazon but it's not sold there any more. We purchased it for about $120.

The Canon's are really good for scanning pictures and negative, even slides! I would highly recommend purchasing a scanner and taking your time doing the archival work yourself. You have control over the time, the cost and most importantly, the finished product.

If you don't get comfortable "fixing" pictures using a photo editing software, you would be able to send files to someone to work on. This way, your originals are safe and if they mess it up, they've messed up a copy of your image.

My husband is really good at this and I'm trying to convince him to start a business. He doesn't think he's that good but he's repaired some and I swear you can't tell they were ever damaged!

Here is a link that might be useful: Canon Canoscan LiDE700F Color Image Scanner

Photos and negs; technical help needed

Comments (6)

ravencajun Zone 8b TX

ntt_hou

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