Do you have old film floating around? If you’re not of the digital native generation, we’re willing to bet you do – and you don’t know what to do with them.
It’s fairly likely that somewhere in your family’s stuff there are those packs of prints you used to get from the chemist, complete with the strip negatives, or even boxes of slides.
Hell, you might even still have an old slide carousel in the back of the wardrobe.
Priceless. Worth keeping, without a doubt, but ageing and fragile. Celluloid perishes over time, and while the Instagram influencers might like that vintage filter that gives a picture that Kodachrome orange cast, when you’re talking about the genuine article that cast will just get worse until too much of the colour has faded and the picture is gone forever.
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
Why should you digitise old film?
Physical celluloid (and for that matter the old 5×6 prints from the chemist) is also vulnerable to loss in other ways – fire and flood can take it all.
How to digitise old film
If you have a scanner and even the most basic image editor on your computer, you can create digital files of your old film negatives and flip the final image to colour positive so that they can be re-printed.
There are drawbacks though: cropping will be necessary to remove the slide mount or sprocket holes, and to create separate image files if you scan a group together at once, and most scanners don’t have the resolution to allow scans of 35m film to be enlarged very far – though if you have patience and and the old slide carousel still works (and a clean white wall!) it is possible to photograph a good sharp projection.
“Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future”
~SALLY MANN
How Chromocat can help
If you don’t have the time, patience or scanner, our slide and negative digitisation service is for you. We’ll scan your film with out high resolution scanner, convert to colour-positive individual image files, and transfer them safely to you via the secure WeTransfer service, for you to download to your own computer.
We can also scan old, damaged photographs and digitally restore them. You will get a hi-res copy of the original scan, and the restored version.
You can then have your old photos reprinted, or display them on a digital frame, giving them a new lease of life and saving them for the next generation.
And, of course, if you would like the really special gems printed as large, frameable prints on quality paper or canvas, we can do that too. You can order prints to fit standard frames, custom-sized prints, or beautiful stretched canvas – our archival print process will produce superb copies that will last another lifetime.