How to Do Everything With Your Scanner- P48 pdf

Scanning Negatives and Slides Chapter 12... How To…■ Understand when it might be advantageous to scan a transparency ■ Get the best results when scanning slides and negatives ■ Decide if

FIGURE 11-13 Example of an i-Zone crew site

Crew member online Crew chat box

Crew member options

CHAPTER 11: Scanning Instant Images: JoyCam, i-Zone, and Other Polaroid Products 219

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Scanning Negatives and Slides

Chapter 12

How To…

■ Understand when it might be advantageous to scan a transparency

■ Get the best results when scanning slides and negatives

■ Decide if you should invest in a transparency scanner

■ Choose a scanner that gives you good-quality transparency scans The process of scanning negatives and slides is not terribly different than scanning photographs—but the end results can be dramatic Negatives and slides give you truer colors and the benefit of starting from the original exposure rather than from a photograph that’s already been processed

Advantages of Being Able to Scan from Negatives and Slides

Printed photographs are often referred to as “originals.” Although this book uses the term in this way, it’s somewhat misleading A “true” original is a negative or slide; a negative is the medium a photograph is produced from Accordingly, a photo is

properly regarded as a copy made from a negative There are several advantages

associated with being able to scan negatives and slides Here are a few of them:

■ Negatives and slides give you an original to match, which can yield sharp detail and high quality, as shown in Figure 12-1

■ Slide images are already in positive form, which offers you the opportunity to transform a wealth of information from old slide collections with your scanner

■ Scanning your own negatives provides an economical alternative to having printed copies made in a photo lab—although most home scanners cannot compete with a lab in terms of quality

Understand More about What Transparencies Are

Transparencies—both negatives and slides—are produced from the film you load into your camera Different types of film produce different types of media Black-and-white

222 How to Do Everything with Your Scanner

pictures are produced from black-and-white negative film, color photos from color

negative film, and color slides are made using color reversal film.

FIGURE 12-1 This photo, by Eric Boutilier-Brown, www.evolvingbeauty.com, shows

the detail from a negative enlarged 10 times

How Negatives Are Made

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines a negative as a “graphic image that reproduces

the bright portions of the photographed subject as dark and the dark parts as light areas.” Negatives are created using film, which is a type of thin plastic coated with chemicals that react to light The film is exposed to light through a camera lens When the shutter, which normally blocks the direct path of light between the film and the lens, is opened, light enters the lens for a precisely measured amount of time to expose the film

When film is exposed, dark areas of the subject are reproduced as light areas, and the light areas become dark—hence the term negative Notice how dark the lightest portion of a photo, a bonfire, appears in Figure 12-2 The developing process reverses these tones and produces a “positive” photographic print, like the one shown

in Figure 12-3

CHAPTER 12: Scanning Negatives and Slides 223

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