Your slides are better than your prints
This surprises people. A 35mm slide or negative holds considerably more detail and colour information than the print that was made from it. The print was limited by the paper, the chemistry, and whatever the lab was doing that afternoon in 1974.
Scanning the original slide or negative at high resolution recovers information that has been sitting in that box unseen for fifty years. People are routinely startled by what was actually in a photograph they've had on the wall for decades.
What we scan
- Photographic prints, loose or from albums
- 35mm slides, including whole carousels
- Negatives, colour and black and white
- Older and less common print formats. Ask
Cleaned up, not just captured
A scan of a damaged photo is a high-resolution copy of a damaged photo. So along with the scan we remove dust, scratches and physical damage, and bring back colour that's faded or shifted with age: the orange cast that afflicts prints from the seventies is largely correctable.
For photographs with serious damage, tears, water marks, missing sections, heavy creasing, see photo restoration, which is detailed repair work rather than an automated clean-up pass.
How it works
- Free consultation and drop-off. Bring what you have to our Edmonton location by appointment. We'll assess volume and condition and quote it clearly.
- The work. Everything is scanned at high resolution and cleaned up, with updates as it progresses.
- Return. Originals come back to you, with the digital files as a download, or on a USB drive if you prefer.
A note on albums and shoeboxes
You don't need to sort anything first. People delay this for years because organising forty years of photographs feels like an enormous job, and then the photographs keep fading while the sorting doesn't happen.
Bring the box. We'll work out the scope together at the consultation.
Why do it now
Colour prints from the sixties and seventies fade measurably, and it doesn't reverse. Self-adhesive "magnetic" albums: the ones with the sticky page and the plastic overlay, enormously popular in the seventies and eighties: are actively damaging: the adhesive yellows, becomes acidic, and eventually bonds to the photograph so firmly that removal tears it.
If your photographs live in one of those albums, that's the batch to deal with first.
Photo, Slide & Negative Scanning, answered plainly.
What does scanning cost?
Should I sort my photos first?
Is it better to scan slides or the prints?
My photos are stuck in an old sticky album. Can you help?
What about badly damaged photos?
THE NUMBER THAT MATTERS
Resolution, without the marketing
Scanning is sold by dpi — dots per inch — and the number is quoted as though bigger is simply better. It is more useful to understand what it is actually measuring, because the right figure for a print and the right figure for a slide are nowhere near each other.
Dpi describes how finely the original is sampled, so what matters is how much you intend to enlarge it. A 6x4 print scanned at 600dpi produces an image of around nine megapixels, which will reprint at its original size with room to spare. Going much beyond that on a print of that size mostly records the paper texture in greater detail.
A 35mm slide is a completely different proposition. The original is barely an inch across, so every print you ever make from it is a substantial enlargement. Scanned at 4000dpi that same frame yields roughly twenty-one megapixels — and unlike the print, that detail is really there in the film waiting to be picked up.
This is why the slides in the loft are so often better than the album on the shelf. The print was one interpretation made in a lab decades ago, at whatever size and colour balance was standard that year. The slide or negative is the original, and scanning it properly frequently produces something visibly better than the print ever was.
THE ORANGE ONES
Why colour negatives look nothing like the picture
Hold a colour negative to the light and it is orange, murky and unreadable. People assume they have found something damaged or badly stored, and quite often throw them out.
That orange is meant to be there. Colour negative film carries a built-in mask — a deliberate overall tint that compensates for imperfections in the film's dye layers. Printing or scanning removes it as part of the process. It is a manufacturing feature roughly as old as colour film itself, not a fault, and not a sign of age.
Which matters because negatives are worth keeping. Like slides, they are the original capture rather than a printed interpretation of it, and they routinely hold detail the prints in the album never showed — shadow detail, and highlights that a machine print clipped away.
If you have negatives, bring them even if you also have the prints. Where both exist, the negative is usually the better source, and where the print has been lost the negative is the whole picture.
PRACTICALLY SPEAKING
Sorting, or the choice not to
The most common thing that stops this job happening is the idea that everything has to be sorted and labelled first. Boxes get pulled out, an evening disappears, the pile gets bigger, and the whole project quietly returns to the cupboard for another two years.
You do not have to sort it. Scanning an unsorted box works perfectly well, and sorting is far easier afterwards on a screen than it ever is on a table — you can search, group and rearrange digital files in seconds, and nothing gets handled twice.
There are two things genuinely worth doing beforehand, and both take minutes rather than evenings. Pull out anything visibly stuck together, mouldy or water-marked so it can be looked at separately. And if there are envelopes with dates or names written on them, keep the envelopes with their contents — that handwriting is often the only record of who is in the picture, and it is worth capturing alongside.
Anything torn, faded or damaged beyond a straightforward scan is a separate conversation: see photo and picture restoration.
WHAT IT COSTS
By the item, with no minimum order
The going rate for scanning in this city is not the problem. The minimums are. Most local services will not open a job under $150, and one of them sets the floor at $200 for slides.
So the single most useful thing on this page is the last row of the table.
Scanning
| Prints up to 8×10each | $0.89 |
| 200 or moreeach | $0.69 |
| 500 or moreeach | $0.55 |
| Slides and negativeseach, scanned at 4000dpi | $1.09 |
| Oversized, up to 11×17each | $3.50 |
| Album and scrapbook pageseach | $2.50 |
| Documents — loose pageseach | $0.35 |
| Documents — bound or stapledeach | $0.55 |
| Minimum orderbring one shoebox or forty | none |
Delivery
| Download link | free |
| USB drive | $20 |
Basic colour correction, cropping and rotation are included. Photographs that need more than that are covered under photo and picture restoration.
THE PROCESS
How the scanning is actually done
Prints are scanned flat on glass so the surface texture of the paper doesn't come through as noise. Slides and negatives go through a transparency scanner instead, which lights them from behind — the only way to read the density range a film original actually holds.
Dust and scratch removal is done in the same pass wherever the film allows it, and colour casts from ageing dye are corrected against what the neutral tones in the frame should be. None of that invents detail; it recovers what the original still carries.
You get the files back as a download, or on a USB drive, or uploaded straight to your own cloud storage — whichever suits you. Your originals come back either way. We don't keep them, and we don't need to keep a copy.
Not sure this is your problem? The free troubleshooter narrows it down in a couple of minutes — no account, no email address, and nothing to pay. It will tell you if the answer is something you can do yourself.
Tell us what it’s doing.
Quotes are free, and we’ll point you at the cheapest thing that actually solves it.