digitize

How to Scan Photos on iPhone

Physical photographs can be scanned with an iPhone and it's easy to get good results with a little preparation and attention to detail. There are several apps that you can use to speed up and simplify the process, each with a different approach. The app that's best depends on your particular needs.

Photomyne Lets You Digitize Multiple Prints at Once with Your Smartphone

Photographers are always telling each other to print their photos, but at the same time, services keep springing up that let you do the exact opposite: digitize your prints. Photomyne is one of these services, a feature-rich smartphone app that lets you turn your old prints into digital files faster than anything else out there.

QromaScan: Digitize and Organize Prints Using Your Smartphone and Voice

QromaScan is a new photo scanning solution that's the world's first to pair smartphone scanning with voice commands for easy digitizing and tagging. It's simple option for people who want to scan their collection of physical prints without having to spend time and money on high-end scanning solutions or services.

ScanMyPhotos Can Scan Your Prints a Priority Mail Boxful at a Time

Have a ton of old prints lying around but not enough time or energy to scan them? Since 1990, Southern California-based ScanMyPhotos has helped customers scan over 250 million physical prints. As digitizing old family photos is catching on as a trend, the company's most popular service is something it pioneered: the USPS prepaid box deal.

It's a flat rate option for scanning large quantities of photos. Pack as many photos as you can into it, send it in, and receive digital versions of every photo.

Neat DIY Projector Rig Lets You Digitize 15 Slides Per Minute Automatically

Not having a dedicated film scanner is no barrier to being able to digitize your slides, but DIY methods we've presented in the past tend to be time-consuming. Even if it's an easy DIY solution that will let you, say, use your desktop all-in-one to scan them in, it'll still take you a long time to digitize the hundreds of slides you might have lying around.

Well, we've finally stumbled across a rig that fixes this problem: All you need is a modified slide projector, a macro lens, and an intervalometer to digitize hundreds of slides in minutes.

One Man’s Quest to Save a Haunting 5,000-Portrait Archive from the Clutches of Time

For going on two decades after the end of World War I, Costica Ascinte was quite possibly the only professional photographer in all of Romania. He continued to work right up until his death in 1984, by which point he had accumulated over 5,000 glass plate negatives and several hundred prints -- a visual history of the Romanian people and a culture that, we know from previous articles, may soon be gone for good.

Unfortunately, this massive, culturally-rich archive is slowly disappearing as time and improper storage take their toll. But one man, Cezar Popescu, is determined to rescue whatever is still salvageable, and is well on his way to digitizing the entire archive even as it deteriorates before his very eyes.

Build a Better Lightbox for Your DIY Film “Scanning” by Stacking Your Glass

More and more photographers are attempting to build their own DIY lightboxes these days as they look for ways to easily digitize their film at home using a digital camera. However, a common problem that plagues these lightboxes is vignetting -- lighting is uneven and shadows form gradients near the edges of the surface.

Photographer Rafał Nitychoruk of Gdynia, Poland tells us that he has solved the problem with his own custom lightbox. The trick? Make your lightbox short, and stack multiple layers of glass.

Modding a Vintage Camera for Digital Use

My name is David Lo, and I am a street photographer who enjoys taking vintage cameras, digitizing them, and then using them for street photography. This is a walkthrough on my process of modifying a camera.

Digitizing Your Film Using Your DSLR

With the cost of my local neg scanner in London being £40/hour for a Hasselblad Flextight, I have been digitising using a DSLR for a quite a while. The results can be extremely good as long as a little time is put into the setup to begin with.

How to Scan Your Film Using a Digital Camera and Macro Lens

Yesterday I wrote a post showing the high level of image quality you can achieve by scanning film using a digital camera rather than a film scanner. This post will describe my personal technique for digitizing film using a DSLR and a macro lens.

Why You Should Digitize Your Film Using a Camera Instead of a Scanner

If you shoot film and aren't much into chemicals (or don’t have a basement in which to keep a gigantic 5×7″ enlarger), you’ll soon find yourself needing a way to import those beautiful pictures you’ve taken onto your computer. What? Why didn’t I say, “you'll need a scanner”? After all, it’s not 1987 anymore -- scanners are as common as toaster ovens.

A Glimpse Inside the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project

There's an abandoned McDonalds in California that's stuffed with 48,000 pounds of 70mm tape. These tapes contain never-before-seen ultra-high-res photographs of the moon shot by the Lunar Orbiter project 40 years ago. Rather than ship the film back to Earth, scientists decided to scan them on the spaceship, beam them back losslessly, and then record the data onto magnetic tape. Not wanting to reveal the precision of its spy satellites, the US government decided to mark the images as classified.

How to Scan Film Negatives with a DSLR

Well, lets just say I've gotten better at this over the last couple of years. The left image was one of the first I've "scanned" with my DSLR, and the one on the right I've just rescanned using the techniques described below (higher resolution available here). Right now I can get higher resolution and better image quality that what street labs give you on CD.