Should You Scan Photos or Negatives If You Have a Choice?

If you have a collection of old family photographs, you may also have the original negatives tucked away in a drawer, envelope or photo album. So, if you have both, which should you digitise?

The answer is usually the negative, if it is still in good condition. However, negatives are more expensive to scan than photographic prints, so you don't necessarily need to scan every negative you have.

For many collections, a mix of photographs and negatives is the best approach. Use the negatives for the photographs that matter most to you, and scan the rest from the original prints.

Why Are Negatives Better?

When you print a photograph, the negative creates a positive image on photographic paper. The print is effectively another generation of the image.

Over time, the print can fade, become scratched, stained or discoloured. The negative may still contain much more of the original information.

This is particularly noticeable with old colour photographs. You may have a print with a strong red, yellow, or magenta colour cast, while the negative is still in relatively good condition.

When we scan the negative, we can digitally invert it to recreate the positive image, then adjust colour, brightness, and contrast.

Negatives Contain More Detail

There is also a technical advantage.

A photographic print has a physical size and resolution determined by the original printing process. When we scan it, we record the information in that print.

A film negative, particularly a 35mm negative, contains a much smaller but highly detailed photographic image. A good film scanner can capture that image at a much higher optical resolution.

For example, a 35mm negative scanned at 4,000 dpi produces an image of roughly 5,700 × 3,800 pixels, or around 21 megapixels.

That doesn't automatically mean that every 4,000 dpi scan contains 21 megapixels of useful photographic detail. The quality of the original film, camera lens, film grain and scanner optics all have an influence. However, it demonstrates why negatives can provide a very high-quality source for digitisation.

Why Are Negatives More Expensive to Scan?

Scanning negatives requires specialist film-scanning equipment rather than the equipment normally used for photographic prints.

The negatives also need to be handled individually and may require additional cleaning and preparation before scanning. This makes the process more time-consuming. As a result, scanning a negative will normally cost more than scanning a photographic print.

It also takes considerably longer to scan a negative than a print.

For a small collection, scanning everything from the negatives may make perfect sense. For a large collection, however, the cost can add up quickly.

This is where choosing a mixture of the two can make sense.

You Don't Have to Scan Everything From the Negatives

If you have hundreds or thousands of photographs and still have all the negatives, you don't necessarily need to scan every negative.

Instead, consider which photographs are particularly important to you.

For example, you might choose the negatives for:

• Wedding photographs

• Baby and childhood photographs

• Important family portraits

• Photographs of relatives who are no longer with you

• Particularly good or memorable photographs

• Photographs you may want to enlarge or print in the future

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For less important photographs, or when the original print is already in excellent condition, scanning may be perfectly adequate.

This gives you a good balance between quality and cost, while still ensuring your most important photographs are digitised from the best possible original.