Sorry for the long length, but photography & digital image buffs may find this interesting and that is who I suspect can help.

I have thousands of 35mm slides and photos that I took before digital cameras existed. I purchased a Visioneer One Touch 9020 scanner that could also scan photos, slides, and negatives. It does a great job of scanning photos (glossy), OCR, newspaper clippings, etcetera, but the results for scanning slides and negatives are disappointing.

I don’t know if there are scanners that do a better job with slides and negatives, but I suspect that affordable ones do not. When you consider how much you are asking the scanner to enlarge what it is scanning and that a slide is not really flat on the glass, it’s asking a lot. I also suspect that few scanners do a great job on matte photos when you think about the texture of the source the scanner’s light has to bounce off of.

It took me a while but I set up my digital camera. I zoomed in at max, determined how to manually focus, and determined the distance to keep the slide from the camera. I used a remote flash to shoot towards the lens to backlight the slide at the correct brightness and now I can make digital images of my slides that are awesome quality. Much better quality than my scanner and much faster too. (Insert slide, click, remove slide, put in another, click…) I can do several in no time at all and it is much better than I expected and consistent quality because the camera settings are manual.

So, rather than try to scan those matte photos that don’t scan so well, why not take a shot of the negative used to make the photo? I have MS Digital Image Suite 10 and one of the tools is to make a negative of the image.

Well, when I shot a digital shot of a negative, the sharpness and brightness is great. But, the color is very bad. When I tell MS Image Suite to make a negative of this negative image it's looks like a blue black and white. So now I know that a digital image's "negative" and a photo "negative" are not the same.

I can play around with the color, saturation, hue, etcetera, but it’s still doesn’t ever get to be a true color. I can’t find anything acceptable. I know it can be done, because as much as I was disappointed with the clarity of scanning a negative on my scanner, the color was converted correctly.

Any tools, tricks, ideas out there?