Photo scanning services?

Wrace wrote:
I found this place on yelp, and it got very good reviews. Technically not really 'local' as it's about 4 hours away. But having to make the drive twice would be worth it to me to get it done.

This is their pricing page. Please take a look. Cost seems pretty reasonable? Standard pricing is for 600dpi. 1200dpi requires a .30 per image addition. I don't see a need for more than 600dpi for just run of the mill images?

I can bring in a portable HD or thumb drive and they will put the images on them.
http://www.lotusmedia.us/pricing-1.html

That is horrible resolution.

I bought a native 2400 DPI manual 35mm and slide scanner many years ago for about $200.

I did that because my Dad wanted to setup his projector one day and we started looking at the slides realizing they were DEGRADING BADLY.

I took on the project at first to scan in my parents wedding pictures for their 40th anniversary. Mom had always fussed that when they got married they couldn't afford a photographer and had one of her Uncles take the photos on slides, she never had prints.

I scanned in the wedding slides then spent two weeks cleaning them with Photoshop to remove the imperfections and damage from time..

Then we had Walmart print them in 8x10s put them into an album along with many other family photos of my brothers and sisters growing up.

My Mom was very happy to have those photos and really cherished the keepsake album.

Took a few years to scan in the rest of my Dads slides and after nearly 4,000 slides I put them all onto DVDs and handed them to my Brothers and Sisters.

I would suggest if you don't want to scan them in yourself then check out Costco or Sam's club. They most likely will send them out to a third party but it will be done for less than many of the other services you will find.

Personally, I would suggest, previewing all of the slides with a projector.

Then decide which ones to scan in and which not to, this will save you from paying for ones that are over or under exposed or just plain no good.

You do also need to understand, NONE of the scanning services will do corrections in brightness/contrast/color/tint.. What you send them will simply get scanned in as is and that is that.

Fixing them will be up to you.

For myself, I am glad I took the time to do it myself, I was able to recover hundreds of photos from slides that were badly exposed and some looked nearly black..

The scanner I bought has many controls to allow me to preview the slide and adjust brightness/contrast/color/tint before scanning in.

Then after scanning in I was able to use Photoshop to fine tune the recovered photo so it almost looked normal.

Most bed scanners simply do not have this level of control..

You could also split up the slides, by a standalone scanner and scan in the "keepers" and for less important slides send them out..