"dennis@home" wrote in message
web.com...
I did send one film off to somewhere that returned a CD of digitised
negatives but they were a pathetic 25k byte jpegs when they came back so
that was a waste of time and money.

You're kidding! What a load of morons!

I scanned the ~6,000 negatives I have myself and that took months of part
time effort.

I bet it did. As a matter of interest, what scanner and software do you use?
I have a Minolta Scan Elite II and I use VueScan. I ought to try again to
install Minolta's own software on Windows 7, because I seem to remember I
got better results with it than VueScan, but that was back in the days of XP
where it installed properly.

I can get good results from slides - even from very overexposed ones from
Mum and Dad's honeymoon (they probably had other things on their mind!) and
likewise some very overexposed ones I took at night time of illuminated
buildings, when I guessed the exposure wrongly.

However I have great difficulty getting realistic ones from colour negs:
they tend to look low-contrast and rather artificial. The best way of
describing them is like colour photos in a book from the 1940s or 50s. I've
tried different settings for film manufacturer and type, as well as tweaking
other variables. Also there is a coarse net curtain effect overlaying the
results, as if the film grain is exceptionally coarse. I seem to need wildly
different exposure and colour balance settings for every frame from the same
strip of negatives.

Sometimes I get very good results and can bring out highlight and shadow
detail that is missing from the prints that the photo shop made, but it's
very hit or miss.