Negatives & Transparencies

TownsWeb Archiving’s negatives scanning service uses expert digitisation technicians with a wealth of experience in scanning negatives and transparencies. Our technicians are fully aware of the challenges this unique material can present.

Digitisation protects your negatives and transparencies from loss or damage and makes them quickly accessible.

TownsWeb Archiving is able to capture most items, regardless of deterioration, and can create output formats in TIFF and JPEG (JPEG2000), or any other industry-standard image format you may require. We can also create further surrogate files for the creation of thumbnails, for example.

Find out how much your project could cost

Visit our digitisation studio – See how our Negative & Transparency Scanning service works

Hear what our clients have to say about our digitisation services

I can safely say that with TownsWeb I happily recommended them to other companies for similar scanning and digitisation [projects] because I know they can be trusted. They can be relied upon to get the job done… they get it right, first time, every time.

Chris Amos

Project Manager

Thanks to the digitisation carried out by TownsWeb, we have been able to extend the reach of our collections, for example by using the high quality images on our website. This makes the material available for those that cannot physically get to our museum due to its rural location, but also globally for research and educational purposes.

Aneesa Riffat

Museum Curator & Project Leader

TownsWeb offered us a complete end-to-end service, from scanning and transcription, to web design and content management software. Their work was completed quickly and to a high standard, and we are extremely pleased with the results.

Lt Col David Owen, MBE

Museum Curator

Digitisation Frequently Asked Questions

We prepare your delicate items using dust blowers to remove surface dust and use high-resolution flatbed scanners or lightboxes to digitise transparencies and negatives up to A3 size (approx. 42x30cm), and a range of high-resolution cameras and lightboxes offering non-contact capture.

Negatives and transparencies are regularly stored in individual envelopes on which information is often recorded, such as dates, descriptions and catalogue references. These references can also be captured, front and back, so important data is not lost. Our technicians are experienced in the careful removal of items from sleeves and we have worked with organisations to catalogue and repackage archive collections. These collections are particularly delicate and so we only ever use expert transportation and packaging for the stable transit of your items.

All files are captured by our highly trained digitisation technicians using overhead, daylight balanced, non-heat producing lighting before undergoing a formal quality assurance checking procedure. The final step in the process is the delivery of your electronic files by hard drive.