How To Improve The Quality Of Your Scanned Prints
The answer is not to scan prints, but to either use a film scanner or to have your film scanned by some of the excellent scanning services that are available. Despite advances in digital camera technology, film remains an excellent medium for the capture and storage of picture information. It doesn’t matter whether the film is colour or monochrome, negative or slide.
A high-resolution film scanner will extract an enormous amount of information from the film and turn it into digital format.
A print is a copy of an image on film. In the analogue world, every time you make a copy you lose information. In the case of a print from a negative, it’s possible to lose over half the picture information – bright and detailed clouds burn out to patches of white, shadow detail is reduced to a dark pool of black and sharp edges are softened. If the colour balance isn’t right because the chemicals haven’t been topped up correctly, you lose colour information.
So why bother making a print? Well, a print contains more than enough picture information for our eyes to extract and we tend not to notice the lost information. We may not realise that it’s a bad copy of a negative or slide – after all, the film is too small for our eyes to read and you’re unlikely to be able to make sense of a negative.
The problem starts when, often using a low-cost flatbed scanner, we make a copy of what is already a rather ropy copy.
The best way to see the difference is to compare an image scanned from a print on a flatbed with one scanned from film. The answer is clear – always try to scan from film!
