Special Report: Scanning 35mm Negatives and Slides, Part IV

By Ara Derderian.
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Part four of four

Now that you have all your negatives or slides scanned as digital files what can you do with them. At this point the images are no different than the images you take with a digital camera. Adding the photos to iPhoto is a great place to start. I have created photo albums from the 50’s through today. If you have a Powerbook or iBook you can play your slide shows on any TV. Looking at these gems are like finding a time capsule in a shoe box.

Since we are all Mac users we also have the benefit of having iDVD available to us. It is quite simple to create a DVD slide show with your images. This is great for mailing to relatives that don’t live close to you. Also, if you don’t have a laptop it is still possible to show off your old pictures on a standard TV. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping files into the iDVD application. You can customize the transitions, duration of each image, and music to play during the slide show. Here is a link to Apple’s discussion on slide shows in iDVD.

Finally you can order prints from Kodak through the iPhoto interface, ofoto (now owned by Kodak), YAHOO, AOL and others. But there are a few things you should consider. Uploading a 30MB file will take a long time even with a high speed connection. Consider resizing your images depending on the size of the print you want to make this process faster. Use the following table to help determine the resolution you need to upload.

Print Size Pixels
4″ x 6″ 640 x 480 pixels minimum.
5″ x 7″ 1024 x 768 pixels minimum
8″ x 10″ 1536 x 1024 pixels minimum
16″ x 20″ 1600 x 1200 pixels minimum
20″ x 30″ 1600 x 1200 pixels minimum.

If you have any questions please feel free to email me at arad@mac.com.

I also want to mention that a colleague and I have started a podcast on High Definition TV and Home theater. You can find more information about it at www.htguys.com