Professional options

Tiff format

We normally return all images in the standard JPG format which are useful for the vast majority of applications, even large scale poster printing. Professional users may require more control over the image, this is where TIFF format files can be utilised.

TIFF files are "lossless", meaning the file is not compressed and reduced in size or detail. However, these files are very large when compared to a regular JPG version. A typical 35mm slide scanned at 3000 dpi saved in JPG format will be around 7MB, whereas when saved in TIFF format it would be about 60MB. When stored as 16bit TIFF files, Large format 5" x 4" sheet films are typically around 135MB when scanned at 1200DPI and 2400DPI files are normally 500MB+ each.

It doesn't take very long for the total size of a batch of Tiff files to grow to large proportions, a few hundred Tiff files can soon fill a hard drive on a regular computer. Therefore you will need to ensure your computer is capable of handling and storing a large quantity of Tiff files.

Colour spaces

sRGB is the common standard used on Microsoft Windows® operating systems and all our images are returned in this colour space as standard, but professional users may prefer a wider gamut colour space. We can scan your film or photos the most common colour spaces such as sRGB, Adobe RGB, Apple RGB, ColorMatch RGB, ProPhoto RGB or ECI RGB.

Digital ICE

Digital ICE 4 is used as standard on all colour film and slide transfers to detect and remove the vast majority of dust and scratches. If you prefer us not to use Digital ICE then the option can be de-selected in the pro-options section of your quotation.

We recommend that Digital ICE is used on all slides and film. De-selecting this option reduces the scan time and therefore the cost per image, but generally results in very marked images.

Digital ICE 4 does not function on black and white film due to the chemicals on the film interfereing with the infra-red light used to detect the particles.

Digitize only

If you are planning on processing the images yourself, then you may wish to select our digitize only option, which removes all colour corrections and processing from the scanned images, giving you the RAW output from the scanner. As no processing time is required for the images the cost per unit is reduced.