Helping Everyday People Scan, Restore, Organize, Preserve and Share Your Photographs

“Hi there. Since you have and use an Epson Perfection V600 I wanted to ask you what is the optimal scan settings for scanning film negatives?

Right now I use 12800 dpi, but I have a feeling it’s overkill and all my indoor night time pictures have a lot of grain. I certainly appreciate whatever advice you have to offer.” ~ Walter Ho.

Walter, thanks for writing me. Let me see if I can help you out with this one.

I would say your gut feeling is right on — 12800 dpi is going to be overkill for negatives. Hopefully you haven’t scanned too many of them if you want to do them over.

I love that we have scanning services out there because I think it would be ignorant of me to assume every one of us with a collection of prints, negatives or slides, who wants a digital version of them, is willing to scan their own photos by hand.
“Excuse me ma’am. Um, but could you like, um, put those cotton gloves on? Please? Yeah. Um. No. How about the thicker ones. Over there. Yeah, those.”

So with this in mind, let me say, doing this review was a big — scratch that — huge step for me. This was the first time I have ever sent any of my family’s photos to a scanning service — or even out of my sight.

But, for me, it’s always been a hard transaction to consider — this whole idea of sending my irreplaceable photographs to a company or someone I have never met and expect everyone who handles them to care for them the same way I do.