Photo Archives
Bringing negatives and slides in to the 21st Century
Bringing negatives and slides in to the 21st Century
Once we had made the transition to digital storage of new photographs we were left with the backlog, often huge, of analogue negatives.
I started with one of the earliest scanners, a Canon FS2700 with a SCSI interface card (this being in the pre-USB days) and its USB successor, the FS2710 and having discarded the useless included software migrated to Hamrick VueScan, still the Gold standard for scanning.
I made the decision early on to use the .TIF format, as repeated editing and re-saving of .JPG files reduces quality due to he comporession algorhythms involved. A compromise quality of 4800dpi was chosen, while 9600dpi is achievable you don't gain any real additonal quality from a 35mm negative and the file sizes get unusably large, the load/save times even across a Gigabit network or onto an SSD become silly.
We scanned 89,000 of Nessa's stepfather's slides and negatives, I contributed a further 22,000, my Mother had around 2,000, my sister's Round the World trip was 1,000 and Nessa's Aunt had 500 2½" square roll film slides that had been unviewable on any normal slide projector since they were taken. The flat scanner took them in its stride. For the slides we bought (and then sold) a Braun Multimag 7000 with extra slideholders. This will scan 50 slides at a time but is quite slow, we tended to leave it going all night.
You do get a feel for the difference between good-quality film (my Kodak films have remained colour-stable for 40 years) and poor quality films (my Mother's Agfa and Boots films certainly deteriorated, most of which fortunatyely is fixable in Photoshop), between good quality optics (Sido's Leica, my OM2 Zuiko lenses) and poor-quality optics (my Mother's successive 35mm compact cameras)
I own a Canoscan 9000F and a 9000F Mark II (faster processor) and this will scan 12 35mm negatives or 4 35mm slides.
We’ve already spoken about the advantages of using .TIF files. Yes, of course JPG files are smaller, but bluntly hard drive space is cheap - you only want to do this job once.Now, what are you actually going to archive?If the negatives or slides are yours, you’ll probably want to scan everything but if they’re your Mother’s and she’s long dead do you need her pictures of hydrangeas in South Aftrica in 1974?Decide on a criteria to whittle down the number of slides / negatives you need to scan.Out of focus pictures you can ditch but poorly framed ones, colour casts and to an extent poor exposure can be fixed in Photoshop, as can errant wires, branches and bystanders (!).You may well find the photographer has taken panoramas. These don’t work well when printed out and sellotaped together but Photoshop will neatly combine them for you. Once you have saved the resulting panorama simply delete the constituent files.
You’ll need a filing system. An example might be a folder for each film, with the folder names with the year and month and a description of the contents e.g. "1986-08 Auntie Flo’s skydiving accident". If you make the start of the folder name yyyy-mm they become self-sorting.Then each .TIF file within that folder could just be 01.TIF, 02.TIF etc.Always start with 01 or 001 if you have more than 100 in a folder, otherwise the first 10 won’t sort properly.
You’ve scanned all the negatives, corrected the colour casts and re-cropped as necessary. What now?Backup your archive to a USB drive, throw the negatives and slides away together with any physical photo albums (oh my God, I suddenly have a whole loft free!) and enjoy your photos.Digital photo frames and computer/tablet screensavers are good display methods.