Newbie Restoring 50-75 Ancient Black & White Family Negatives

[ShelleyT]

Hi, I found this forum looking for tips on restoring these negatives for my family. Scanning with an HP Scanjet G4050 & Photoshop 4 which I've used before using very elementary processes. Trying to edit the negative before scanning with the HP "Solutions" software that's supposedly best with the scanner (downloaded from HP). Have possibility to use Corel Draw 8 (another ancient program) which haven't tried before. Wondered if anyone has similar experiences and whether I should consider the TWAIN that is also available rather than the HP software for scanning, and whether anyone has experiences with either Adobe or Corel and negative work. My last worry: can I do anything about negatives that have fingerprints on them BEFORE I scan them: trying not to handle them overly but wondered if there is anything one can do with them besides blowing the dust off. Thank you for reading this.

[Manfred M]

Hi, I found this forum looking for tips on restoring these negatives for my family. Scanning with an HP Scanjet G4050 & Photoshop 4 which I've used before using very elementary processes. Trying to edit the negative before scanning with the HP "Solutions" software that's supposedly best with the scanner (downloaded from HP). Have possibility to use Corel Draw 8 (another ancient program) which haven't tried before. Wondered if anyone has similar experiences and whether I should consider the TWAIN that is also available rather than the HP software for scanning, and whether anyone has experiences with either Adobe or Corel and negative work. My last worry: can I do anything about negatives that have fingerprints on them BEFORE I scan them: trying not to handle them overly but wondered if there is anything one can do with them besides blowing the dust off. Thank you for reading this.

Hi Shelly - welcome to CiC.

A few thoughts; TWAIN is driver software and takes care of the transfer of data from the scanner to the computer. By itself, it is useless and you will need scanning software as well.

Cleaning the negatives is certainly going to help, but the oil from fingerprints will have nicely blended with the negative emulsion and I would rather doubt that you can remove it without damaging the negative. These defects are best corrected after scanning. Depending on how the negatives were stored, these will likely have deteriored as well and typically subtle details tend to get lost. If they are colour negatives, the dyes do change over time and different dyes deteriorate at different rates, so colour balance will likely be off. If they are black and white, they do deteriorate as well, especially if the processor did not wash out the chemicals the negatives were processed in properly.

As for using Corel Draw 8, it is rather ancient (1997 release) and is a vector graphics tool, so is not useful for photo retouching. It will certainly not run on new operating systems.

All that being said; restoring old images requires a raster editing tool, like Photoshop and involves a fair bit of expertise. While dust is fairly easy to remove, removing fingerprints can be fairly simple to extremely difficult, depending on where they are in the image. The other work that is required really depends on the condition of the negatives and can vary from trivial (although this is generally unlikely) to being very complex and time consuming for someone with a lot of expertise. One has to see the images before one can make a call on that and not all negatives are recoverable.

Regardless, what you are planning to do is not trivial, requiring the right tools and significant expertise.

[ShelleyT]

Thanks so much for that answer. I'll leave the negatives be. Glad I could eliminate the Twain and Corel Draw.
You answered my questions. Now another one for you, or anyone else Please: would it be worth scanning the negatives (they're almost totally black and white, only a few color ones) as 'tiffs' instead of jpegs? I'm using the tutorials here and a book for Photoshop 4 complete. Also ordered one of the books on Sharpening so I'm pretty serious about this. Levels and histograms - still having difficulty with that but expect just need more experience. Only scanned a couple jpgs and now I'm believing will have better results (not that these results were bad) if I scan as color (?) using tiff, but haven't tried it YET. Want a good (archive quality?)digital negative for the negatives since they're so old, they aren't going to last longer without deterioration so could make up a DVD or two. Do you have thoughts about tiffs and is it wasted with black and white negatives, are the file sizes enormous, my negatives aren't that badly damaged thus far as far as I can tell. Thank you again,
Shelley

[Manfred M]

jpegs are not the best format to use as a "lossy" compression format is used and some data is thrown away. TIFF format is 16-bit rather than the 8-bit used in jpeg, so again, better data. Both of these are probably going to be more important in colour work than in B&W. I would certainly go for TIFF, rather than jpeg, in spite of the file size.

Optical disks like DVDs are generally not viewed as a great archival format as the can start losing data in as little as a couple of years, and really top end is probably 10 years. The issue with any digital storage mechanism is that once the format becomes obsolete and the reader either dies or is no longer supported by the computer operating system, reading the data will become impossible. This is generally referred to as "digital rot", and frankly there is no good solution out there yet.

S

[FrankMi]

Hi Shelly, from a different perspective you might want to isolate those negatives that you hold precious and get them professionally digitized.

I have spent a lot of time scanning in old photographs and color slides and I have retouched a few that were critically sentimental. I was never able to scan them all and in the end, the quality had deteriorated so much as to not have been worth the effort. It was those precious few that really have meaning and value to me that were worth the time and effort to get restored.

Here is one scanned from wallet size snapshots taken in 1963 when my wife and I were dating. I still carry the original of her in my wallet to this day but it is nowhere near in this condition. I also have several other family shots going back to the early 40's that are near and dear.

[Ronny]

Hi Shelley,
I am also a person that does a lot of work cleaning, editing and restoring old pictures. And the pictures I wotk on are pictures from taken between 1930 and 1940. Beside that I had about 1500 negatives and slides that I scanned into my computer. Most of these pictures are from the late 50 until 1980. I use the software Topazlabs and Adobe Element.
But what do you want to reach with your old pictures. My goal is creating a genealogy of the family with pictures and names.
You have to set your goal what you want to reach with the old pictures.