B&W Negatives

I'm a real novice at computing. I'm not even sure what PhotoShop is. But, maybe someone can help me. I recently visited a long lost cousin. She has several shoe boxes full of 6x9 black and white (B&W) negatives of photos taken in the 1920's of our family, including her mother, my father (They are brother and sister) our grandparents, etc. We have no idea where the positive B&W photo prints are if they exist at all. So, we would like to find a way (hardware and software) to scan these negatives, store them in digital form on a computer,and print them out as positive B&W prints. Any suggestions are greatly apprecicated.

Hello grranch, Welcome to I-US, I opened your topic so a reply could be posted, you might want to peek at the faq to get an idea about posting options, a closed topic means nothing else can be posted to it.

Your best bet for the film would be to take it to someone who has a darkroom / enlarger with a 6 inch negative mount, have them make prints.

To scan the film you will need a scanner with a transparency adapter, scan the film then invert the image with photo editing software to make it positive.

best wishes
Mike Bailey, visiting moderator

About 18 months had to restore some old and damaged photographs from around the 1920's for a friend.

The tool I ended up using was, unbelievably, Kai's PhotoSoap V1.0 a $30 package. It was made for the task.

If you do get your negatives into a computer readable format I can definitely recommend looking at this package, it is designed for novices to use, but some of it's features are so good and I'll be honest about this fun, I still use it on occasions.

It's difficult to get hold of now since Metacreations sold off all their programs and I am unsure where this particular program ended up.

Peter

P.S. Silly me I forgot I could upload an example.

[This message was edited by Peter Clifton on September 14, 2000 at 08:07 AM.]

I just did a photo retouch job too. I scanned in the photoprint (did not have negs) and did the fixup in photoshop. The photo was badly damaged...in three pieces with severe cracking and staining. Used the cloning tool for the most part. But also airbrushed or painted in some areas too. The stains were the hardest to deal with. In the past, I have found that you may be able to remove alot of the guck in one particular channel. For this one, I was not as lucky...the stains were in all the channels (which made editing tougher). Even switching to LAB was no help. Oh well. I ended up just using the L channel and switching to greyscale to do my correcting. At the end, I did a duotone effect to bring back the warm sepia tone.

Anyway, the final tiff file was output with a LightJet 3000 onto photographic paper. This is actually a photographic process (not inkjet) and the results were really impressive. It uses a 36 bit colour space so the range in colour is pretty good. The price was not too bad either, $200 for 8 pictures that were 30 by 8 inches (thats canadian dollars). I plan to do more of this in the future.

Beth