digitization

Photographer Turns Slide Projector Into a Arduino-Powered Digitizer

For those with family members who grew up in the 1980s (or earlier), a slide projector was a pretty common way to share and show images before the internet was a thing. But these days, finding a way to get people to sit and view these images in a dark room with you is even harder than finding a functional projector. To covert his old 35mm slides to digital, photographer Scott Lawrence built a custom digitizing system based on a slide projector.

Reaching the Megapixel Limit (for 35mm Camera Scanning)

Since I first started camera scanning, I've always advocated using the highest resolution camera you can get ahold of. (My first camera scans were with the 1.3-megapixel Nikon E2n, so it's been a long road.) That advice is changing.

Rare Photos of Hitler from Glass Plates by His Personal Photographer

Hitler's personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, was one of the infamous dictator's primary propagandists, and tens of thousands of the photographer's photos exist on glass plate negatives. Now a large number of those rare photos are being revealed with a new level of clarity through a digitization effort by the National Archives.

Review: The Nikon D850’s Negative Digitizer Isn’t Ready for Prime Time

A couple weeks ago, I got a chance to run the Nikon D850 through its paces as a scanner. The “Negative Digitizer” feature, which can automatically flip negatives to positive got a lot of buzz as the camera was being released, and I was eager to try it out.

How I Built a Film-Digitizing Lightbox

Shooting film is fun and developing film is fun, but tediously scanning film is not fun... so I built myself a film-digitizing light box to be used with a flash and a 1:1 macro lens.

Using Humidification and Electrostatic Force in Digitizing Old Newspapers

Often when scoping out digitization projects, devising complementary conservation treatments that assist in digital photo capture are challenging aspects of overall workflow design. And so it has been the case with our recent efforts at UConn Library on a set of 19th century Latin American newspapers from the University's archives and special collections.

Digitizing 9×9 Film with an Automated X-Y Table and a 50MP Canon 5DS R

One of the challenges (and rewards) of managing a digital production lab for a university research library is working with the wide assortment of analog formats that are collected within its archives, special collections, and map library holdings. For instance, we've recently begun conversion work on a 2002 aerial survey of Connecticut that was originally shot on 9"x9" positive black and white film.

DIY Film ‘Scanning’ with LEGO and an iPhone

Want to scan some film but don't have a scanner handy? You can actually do some high quality digitization using some LEGO blocks, a smartphone or tablet, and a camera with decent resolution. Filmmaker Zachary Antell uses a method using those components, and his results are pretty impressive.

QromaScan: Digitize and Organize Prints Using Your Smartphone and Voice

QromaScan is a new photo scanning solution that's the world's first to pair smartphone scanning with voice commands for easy digitizing and tagging. It's simple option for people who want to scan their collection of physical prints without having to spend time and money on high-end scanning solutions or services.

Microsoft’s New Office Lens App Can Transform Your Phone Into a Simple Photo Scanner

Today Microsoft announced that it has released its Office Lens app for iOS and Android. If you've never heard of it before, Office Lens is an advanced camera app that turns your phone into a scanner. Take a picture of a document or a whiteboard, and the app will automatically turn the image into a straight and clear scan.

What's neat is that the app can also be used to quickly and neatly digitize a print instead of putting the photo through an actual scanner.

How to Scan Your Film Using a Digital Camera and Macro Lens

Yesterday I wrote a post showing the high level of image quality you can achieve by scanning film using a digital camera rather than a film scanner. This post will describe my personal technique for digitizing film using a DSLR and a macro lens.