Old Film Negatives + Today Tech

Thought I would put up a review of sorts as well as to ask for opinions.

Anyway, I picked up a PLUSTEK 7500i scanner and have been playing with scanning in some old negatives. This has proven to be fun as well as a pain at the same time. It is amazing to me just how much more detail our new cameras today are able to capture (well for me anyway), but the depth of the photos appear to my eye to be better on the film negs...

My workflow thus far is to scan the photo into the computer as a .tiff file. Leaving all of the settings on the scanning software on default/zeros. Then open it in Photoshop (CS4) to clean up. As you will see, storing my negatives in the film sleeve and then a shoe box for years on end, has not been to kind to the negatives. Lots of scratches and other imperfections. STScott bequeathed (raffled) off his old WACOM Tablet, and I will say that it has proven to be a great tool to use during this process.

First the PLUSTEK scanner is fast, quiet and if you want it to, will push out scans at 7200 dpi, which results in a file size of nearly 1GB (). But if you keep it at 300 ~ 600 dpi, it is really quick and +/- 3mb file size. It has many film manufactures & products pre-loaded in its database, (Fuji, Kodak, ect). Depending on your choice of film, will greatly alter the scanned image, too much color, not enough color, black and white. This took me a while to figure out, but the film you shot is actually written on the developed negative (on the edges). After I took my palm away from my forehead upon that realization, the workflow sped right up.



The scanner comes with a tray for negatives, and a tray for slides, and will clamp them inplace. It only does one image at a time, and you have to manually advance the tray to get the to the next image. For me this is not a big deal, but an automatic advance would be a nice addition.

You can manipulate the photo in a lot of ways using the scanning software, but I chose to leave it set to its defaults, and with the least amount of tweaking and then set work on the image in Photoshop. Which leads me to using the WACOM pen & tablet set that STScott gave me. This is by far one of the slickest tools to complement Photoshop that I have ever seen (used). It helped to speed up the process of fixing the blemishes / scratches and my fingerprints from the images. Thanks Scott!

Here are some before/after examples of what I have gotten myself into.

These were taken back then with my Minolta 5000i, and 50mm lens. I am sure everything was set to AUTO, and Kodak 400 Gold film.

Its hard for me to believe that these two photos were taken just about 15 years ago.

Before: (Yes she is 15 now, but if you ask her she will say 25!)


After:


Before: (Can you guess what we are doing?)


After:


Before: (I didn't Know I had it so good, those were the days!)


After:


I would like your opinions of how you think I have done with these, regarding the post processing, how would you modify these to make them better?

I would also like to solicit any pointers from those that have undertaken such a task before me.

Thanks for looking.
Duke.

I think they look great, I have messed with some old photos, but I am not nearly as dedicated as you are. I also don't have photoshop, so it is not nearly as nicely done. Yours are indeed wonderful.

She is 22 now,



This is when she was 12 and rejetting my ZRX



And my only online ZRX picture I scanned.



So, I guess, I am saying, your pictures are fantastic, I will have to go get photoshop to fix mine.

Nicely done sir.

Just remember that dpi means dots per inch. Basically the resolution of what you are scanning. Most photographs are printed at 200-300 dpi. If the neagative you are scanning is scanned at 200-300 dpi, it's only an inch maybe itself. That means if you ever want to print from your scanned image, the quality surely won't be there. Your current resolution is fine for viewing on the computer which typically displays at 72dpi, but if you are archiving with the idea of later printing some of them then you might consider scanning at a higher resolution, obviously at the cost of size and time.

gixxerjasen said:

Just remember that dpi means dots per inch. Basically the resolution of what you are scanning. Most photographs are printed at 200-300 dpi. If the neagative you are scanning is scanned at 200-300 dpi, it's only an inch maybe itself. That means if you ever want to print from your scanned image, the quality surely won't be there. Your current resolution is fine for viewing on the computer which typically displays at 72dpi, but if you are archiving with the idea of later printing some of them then you might consider scanning at a higher resolution, obviously at the cost of size and time.

Click to expand...

Yep, most (affordable) printers max out around 1200dpi. You can still get a pretty quality enlargement from a 1200-2400dpi setting and it will save quite a bit of drive space over 7200dpi and provide a better quality larger print. With the 300dpi you probably wouldn't want to print out anything larger than snapshot (4x6) size.

As cheap as storage is these days, I would go with the highest resolution possible.

gixxerjasen said:

Just remember that dpi means dots per inch. Basically the resolution of what you are scanning. Most photographs are printed at 200-300 dpi. If the neagative you are scanning is scanned at 200-300 dpi, it's only an inch maybe itself. That means if you ever want to print from your scanned image, the quality surely won't be there. Your current resolution is fine for viewing on the computer which typically displays at 72dpi, but if you are archiving with the idea of later printing some of them then you might consider scanning at a higher resolution, obviously at the cost of size and time.

Click to expand...

Correct.. dpi doesn't mean anything without a dimension to go along with it. Most pro labs print at either 250 or 300dpi. Anything above that your eye can't really discern the difference anyway. But.. consider that if you want to print an 8x10, you'll need a file that's AT LEAST 2500 pixels in the long dimension (actually, since 8x10's are cropped, 3000 would be safer). The comes out to right at 6 mega pixels. Tiffs are nice, but they are also huge. If it were me I'd take the higher resolution and save them as jpgs.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

OLDTLSDOUG, looks like you did real good for not having photoshop, either that or you took much better care of your negatives than I have. Seems every negative I pull from its sleeve has rub marks and blemishes. Well Done! Which film scanner do you have, and what software are you using?

Right now I am scanning in at 300dpi at 4x6 for the size. But after reading your suggestions and finding this on the web :link:, I will be changing that.

from linked page above said:

For example, a full frame 35 mm color negative scanned at 2400 dpi will be about 3400x2200 pixels, and about 22 megabytes. Scanning at 2400 dpi and printing at 300 dpi allows enlarging that printed image 8 times more than the original film size (2400/300 = 8). Scaling by 8, so that the 1.4 x 0.9 inch film size (36 x 24 mm) prints 8X larger gives 11.2 x 7.2 inches. It will look great in regard to detail if printed at 200 to 300 dpi (assuming the printer can handle it). Scanning film originals can support this level of detail. Scanning a 6x4 inch photo will not.

Click to expand...

I will not be scanning many at 2400dpi or greater until I have one that I just know I will want to print. As for scanning to JPG, I did not think of that. Will not a .tiff be more photoshop friendly though?

dixonduke said:

Thanks for the feedback guys.

OLDTLSDOUG, looks like you did real good for not having photoshop, either that or you took much better care of your negatives than I have. Seems every negative I pull from its sleeve has rub marks and blemishes. Well Done! Which film scanner do you have, and what software are you using?

Right now I am scanning in at 300dpi at 4x6 for the size. But after reading your suggestions and finding this on the web :link:, I will be changing that.



I will not be scanning many at 2400dpi or greater until I have one that I just know I will want to print. As for scanning to JPG, I did not think of that. Will not a .tiff be more photoshop friendly though?

Click to expand...

I would scan as a jpg and if you edit using layers (which you should always do), then save that file as a tiff so if you decide to re-edit the photo you can go into each individual layer and make your touch ups.

Here is my folder set up:

1) unedited, directly scanned images saved as jpg

2) contains copies of scanned edited photos saved as .tiff (this way if I want to re-edit one I can work on the individual layers)

3) contains tiff files saved as .jpg for export/email/printing and once they are exported/printed/emailed they are deleted.

No matter what you do, always save an unedited version...the edit you like today may not be the edit you like tomorrow and if you edit a photo and use "save" instead of "save as" you are stuck like chuck with that edit.

Hard drives are cheap these days....memories are not.
Regardless of what you do I would keep a folder of unedited originals

Another reason to stay with tiff as you are scanning.
TIFF is lossless when you make any change it keep all the info.

JPEG is "lossy," you always lose some information from the original image
when you compess a JPEG file. Everytime you make a change you are losing info.