Save Your Slides From Low-Quality Scans

They\'ll give you a “scan.” We give you a finished photograph image. Our Photoshop technicians—artists, really—personally enhance each image so it looks closer to the day it was captured.

Non-automated editing on every scan includes precision cropping, exposure correction, overall color correction and enhancement, shadow recovery, and rotation/straightening.

Most mail-in scanning services are running batch operations. Your slides go into a machine, come out the other end, and get shipped back. No human ever looks at a single image. That is how they can offer low prices. It is also why so many customers come to us after getting their results back from a competitor and being disappointed — or worse, not realizing the results are poor until they try to enlarge an image or display it on a modern TV.

What Low-Quality Scanning Actually Costs You

The real cost of a low-quality scan is not the money you paid for it. It is the slide itself. Once a slide has been scanned — even poorly — most people put it back in a box and consider the job done. The slide continues to deteriorate. Years later, when someone wants a better scan or a print, the original slide has faded further. The window for getting a good result from that slide has narrowed or closed entirely.

A poor scan also tends to hide the original quality of the image. Many slides that look hopeless when scanned by an automated batch service turn out to have recoverable detail and color when scanned properly and edited by hand. We see this routinely — customers send us slides they assumed were ruined based on a bad scan someone else delivered, and we return images that look dramatically better than anything they had seen before.

Getting it right the first time is not just about quality. It is about not burning your one opportunity to preserve an image properly.

What We Fix on Every Single Scan

Color cast removal. Aged slides develop color casts — most commonly a warm orange or red shift as the cyan dye layer fades. We identify the correct white balance for each image individually and correct it.

Exposure correction. Batch scanners expose for the overall average brightness of a slide. Slides that are significantly brighter or darker than average come back overexposed or underexposed. We adjust each scan to the correct exposure for that specific image.

Shadow recovery. Dark areas of an image are frequently crushed to solid black by automated scanning. We use Photoshop shadow recovery tools to lift those areas and reveal detail that was present in the original film.

Precision cropping. We crop to the actual film area, removing mount borders without cutting any part of the image. Specialty formats like 127 Super Slides get format-appropriate cropping rather than the standard 35mm crop that competitors apply to everything.

Rotation and straightening. Slides mounted slightly crooked are straightened. Portrait slides rotated to landscape for scanning are rotated back to the correct orientation in the digital file.

Pricing: Short Version

Minimum scanning charge is $20 per order. Includes scanning, overall Photoshop editing, and a free data disc.

• Most 2" x 2" slides: $0.49 each (4,000 ppi)
• 127 slides: $2.00 each (4,000 ppi)
• Stereo slides: $1.50 each (4,000 ppi)
• View-Master reels: $15 per reel (1 film of each pair)
• Disc negative reel: $39.00
• 4" x 6" paper prints: $0.49 each (600 ppi)

Return shipping is based on weight and typically mirrors your inbound cost.

No commitment — nothing is ordered until your slides arrive.

4,000 ppi Slide Scanning

We scan at 4,000 pixels per inch. A typical 35mm slide is delivered at about 5256 × 3544 pixels — far beyond a 1080p HDTV (1920 × 1080) and large enough to make high-quality prints at any normal size. Most batch services scan at 2,000 ppi or less. The difference becomes visible any time you try to enlarge an image, print it at 8×10 or larger, or display it on a 4K television.

Read customer testimonials and request 10 free demo scans to see the difference before you decide.

We also make prints from slides. Still just $1.49 for most slides to 4" x 6" prints.