Everyday flatbed scanners don’t work to scan slides and negatives because they need to be backlit — here are some ways to scan in your negatives without paying someone to do it.
Solution 1
If you have old negatives or slides that you want to preserve digitally, you probably know that just throwing them on your flatbed scanner won’t work. You need a bright light source that comes from behind the negative and the multi-function printer/scanner you use to print coupons is seriously lacking in that department. However, a new tutorial from Craft Magazine shows you how you can hack up a bit of silver cardboard, and get you film negatives onto your computer. – Continue Reading
Solution 2
It’s really important to make sure your negatives and your scanner are both clean, as tiny hairs and dust will show up quite easily using this technique. Also be prepared to experiment with the amount of paper you use and the brightness of the lamp, as you may have to change these depending on the original exposure quality on your negative.
Step One
Place your nicely cleaned negative (face down) onto your nicely cleaned scanner.
Step Two
Place your paper on top of your negative, I suggest starting off with trying 5 sheets of paper and adjust the amount accordingly. Obviously less paper lets in more light (you may want to try going down to a minimum of 2 sheets of paper if you have a particularly dark negative to scan)
Step Three
Place your lamp onto or over the paper (make sure you don’t have your bulb touching the paper – You don’t want to start a fire!!!) I suggest the lamp is about 30 to 40cm away from the paper; you can obviously experiment with the distance to get the best results. I also had my lamp on the first (dimmest) dimmer setting.
Step Four
Scan your results in, changing the amount of paper or brightness of the bulb to get the best result.
Step Five
When you are happy with your results, I suggest scanning them in at the highest dpi setting your scanner will do! Enjoy!
Solution 3
All you need is a way to turn a large portion of the screen entirely white (e.g. a “flashlight” app). Simply place the device facedown over the film on the scanner, and scan it with the cover open.
If you’re scanning negative film, you’ll need to invert the resulting scan: – Continue Reading
Solution 4
The basics are quite simple: you take a photo of a negative into a light source and invert. – Continue Reading
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