scanning negatives????

[liquidmonkey]

i know this is not LR specific but everyone here seems a photo guru and might b able to help...

i have nearly a thousand old negatives (1' - 15 years old) and would like to scan them into digital format but i have no scanner so have to take them to a photography lab.

1) is it possible to scan the negatives in a way that i get a RAW file? similar to that on my nikon d7's when shooting in RAW mode?

2) what does BASE 4 and BASE 16 equate to in quality terms?

3) can you recommend a photography lab?

4) is there a particular professional machine i should look for when going to various photography labs?

thanks in advance

 

[Witwald]

1) is it possible to scan the negatives in a way that i get a RAW file? similar to that on my nikon d7's when shooting in RAW mode?

It may be possible, but it seems unnecessary. Just make sure that all the scans are done as 16-bit TIFFs, using no compression or lossless file compression. At the very least, specify Adobe RGB as the colour space to be used, so that the colour gamut of the negatives is reasonably well captured by the scan. Taking those steps should help to maximise the quality of the scans.

 

[Scott O]

Also, consider the final use of your scans. The requirement for print will be much different than the requirement for computer/television/projection. And of course you will need to have a bit of storage available...

 

[Andrew Hayton]

You might find it cheaper to buy your own scanner in the end with that many negs to get scanned, just a thought. But scanning needs vary on the final use. screen only needs low res scans but print needs hi-res scans.
What are you intending to do with them?

 

[liquidmonkey]

i only want to have the pics on my PC at the moment as i almost never make prints. i'm not a print kind of guy to be honest.
however, i do want the highest quality scans and just convinced the tech at (walmart of all places) to scan them in at 16 BASE which is double the quality than 4 BASE...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_CD

unfortunately i was not able to specify 16-bit tiff's as the final output, their machine is only setup for jpg, but hey, its walmart so i'm not going to complain.
plus, its super cheap!! 1'' images at 16 BASE per photo CD at $5 CDN compared to another place in town that would do 4' images per CD at $3 CDN at only 4 BASE.
so cheaper price and twice the resolution at walmart, who would have thought!!

still would have been good to go to a pro photo lab and get them done but we don't have one here in town so walmart will do nicely.

thanks for the advice everyone!

 

[Denis Pagé]

Also consider the fact that Photo CD is a dead format and Lightroom won't read them...

 

[liquidmonkey]

very true but the actual files are still able to be copied from the photo CD onto your computer and from there, well, anything is possible