Scanning: The Old World Joins the New

So many of us immersed in digital photography only look forward, eagerly awaiting the next generation of digital cameras, new and improved ways of editing pixels, and the ever expanding gamut and dynamic range of inkjet printers. With all the forward momentum, we tend to forget that one of photography’s major purposes is to create memories, allowing us to look backward at what was. And for many of us, that means drawers of negatives, prints and metal boxes full of slides.

Wat Arun, Bangkok (Detail)Colour Negative Scanned in SilverFast Ai Studio 6.6 with Negafix
All this stuff degrades over time, so the contemporary advice is to digitize it for enhancement and indefinite preservation. Enter scanners and scanning software – a field which retains a steady clientele despite the onslaught of digital capture. A few firms still manufacture film scanners and several scanning applications are on the market, of which SilverFast remains the most comprehensive.
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