Old School, New School: photography

[furtech]

A friend of mine just uploaded some great pictures taken years ago. These were taken with a film-type camera (as opposed to a digital camera), so he had to pull out boxes, probably sort hundreds of pictures, cull them, scan and then upload them. The result, though, was that his friends got to see pictures of him taken years ago-- really neat.

Is there an easy way to get one's negative/prints scanned and organized? If not, then -there's- a product that needs inventing. Some device that you can feed in a stack of negatives and the device will clean and load the negative strips, scan the images and date them (most film negatives of the last 30 years did have processing dates imprinted on them).

Anyone know of something like this? Or a service? Probably the step that I hate most is the cleaning/scanning part: you can't just pull negatives out and scan them-- any lint of dust on the neg will ruin the result. Getting that off takes a few minutes each...and even then doesn't guarantee that schmutz won't attach itself in the short time between opening the scanner and dropping the negative in.

It's almost like photography was just "invented" in the last ten years if you go by what's on the archive sites like Flickr and Photobucket.

I have boxes of pictures and negatives that I doubt I'll ever get around to manually scanning.

Comments

[wyoon.livejournal.com]

I'll be waiting to see if anybody replies to this. I've scanned nearly 600 pictures and a small percentage of them ended up on facebook to share with past classmates. It was a pain and it still didn't capture the originals quality.

[vandringar.livejournal.com]

That would be nice to have. I have a box of old photographs that I don't even want to open, because they're frustratingly non-digital.

I did, however, recently discover a small stack of photos I took as a kid. That was an interesting trip to my past.

[didjiman.livejournal.com]

A number of services do it for about 30 cents per neg. They usually ship your stuff to India and even do color correction.

Dust is actually not a huge problem as most of the better scanners have "dust removal" features. It uses the IR channel so it works quite well. B&W or Kodachrome is another matter.

I still shoot film some of the times, especially B&W now.

[mistahbojangles.livejournal.com]

I can look into it. I've never done this myself, but my father digitized a bunch of our old family photos through a service and the results were decent enough. I don't think the service he used did anything to improve upon what was physically presented, but the results were appealing.

[oats-a-plenty.livejournal.com]

I was going to say, there are services that you can pay to have this done. Being inherently female, I love non-digital photo albums and such. There's something about a picture being a tangible object that makes it better.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Exactly! I want images as clean and at as high a resolution as is possible. With minimal hassle.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is quantity: I have probably have in the neighborhood of 2000 negative strips that I would like to at least get digitized so that I can sort them out.

The cost isn't as much a consideration (as long as the quality is sufficiently high) as is the inconvenience: I would like to be able to scan them by roll of film (usually about 5-8 strips of 4-5 pictures each), so that I can just replace them in the storage box. If there was a service that I could trust to send a huge, disorganized box of packets of pictures and negatives that they would replace into their packages (which are already crudely labeled), that would be ideal. I kind of doubt such a thing exists-- they probably want the negs at least packed into pages.

If there was some device I could buy or rent that sat on the counter beside me that I could feed strips of negs into on my own time: perfect!

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Does "decent" mean that there were no dust specks or lint on the scans and the resolution was high? I'm looking for something that will scan the negs into files that are at least the equivalent of a 10 megapixal digital picture, that replicates the original color and exposure.

Also, check to see how they require the negatives to be packed for them, especially if we are talking large (hundreds) of negative strips.

Thanks!

[furtech.livejournal.com]

I love photo albums too: I even collect them (other people's albums, from Ebay and garage sales). If only I was organized enough to put them together properly. Some people are -really- good at this! *envy*

[skorzy.livejournal.com]

If you have photoshop, removing dust and speckles is very easy. Keep in mind my scans are from print, and the middling quality of the scan makes sense. I could automate photoshop to automatically resize, despeckle, descratch and color correct, but not all photos respond the same to that treatment.

This wouldn't take as much time if I had a USB 2 scanner. Mine is ancient, running original USB. Three pics at time... Though its worth it for many of my photos.

[groggyfox.livejournal.com]

I actually still shoot with my old full manual Canon FTbN and B&W film. Nowadays, I just request a CD along with my negatives from the places i get my stuff developed. Before they did CD's I would just scan them with a film/negatives scanner, though the quality was pretty lacking. I do believe you can bring negatives to any place that does developing and get them to scan your pics onto a CD for you for a small fee since they can do reprints and enlargements from negatives. =^.^=

[tioh.livejournal.com]

Negative and slide scanners are not that expensive anymore. I used one at the university years ago - saw the same model on ebay just now (for 140$). There are a lot of cheaper machines around, but I dont know how good the quality is.

http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=film+scanner&_sacat=0&_trksid=m270&_odkw=dia+scanner&_osacat=0

Examples

[mistahbojangles.livejournal.com]

I uploaded some example images that show a progression of the results from bad to good. It seems to me that the quality results depend greatly on the condition and quality of the film negative. The oldest photo example dates back to the late 1950's and shows warping in the negative surface, an aggressive red color cast, and a poor resolution of details despite the high quality scan performed. It looks as if this scan shows the limitations of the camera and film that created the photo in the first place rather than a poor performance of the scanning service:

http://www.toonfox.com/photos/film%20photo%20scans/42880032.JPG

The second photo shows lots of dots and pixel-ish looking elements in the shadowed faces, but the details are a lot cleaner in the sunlit areas. There's also some crud and disturbance in the upper left corner that's visible. This photo dates to around 1983 and probably was taken with a point-and-shoot camera:

http://www.toonfox.com/photos/film%20photo%20scans/42880035.JPG

The last photo is probably taken around 1974 using my father's SLR camera and shows excellent clarity all around probably because of the good lighting. There's some color and spotty weirdness appearing in the large black patch of the lamp post in the right side of the picture however, so that might be an indication of where the scanning process stumbles.

http://www.toonfox.com/photos/film%20photo%20scans/42880030.JPG

All of these pictures measure 3139x2048 pixels, or about 6.5 megapixels. I don't know if that resolution is dependant on the source negatives or the maximum the scanner can support, but as comparison the photos I took with my film SLR camera back in 2003 came back from the developer on CD as 1536x1024 resolution, which I thought sucked and was a big reason why I was so keen to move to a digital SLR to up the resolution possibilities:

http://www.toonfox.com/photos/new_camera/locks_1_full.JPG

photo preservation

[mom-squared.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth...for 2 years I have been using an Epson Perfection scanner, which does photos, slides, negatives and prints, and have been happy with the results. So far 3,000 color slides scanned, (color restored, dust removed, backlight corrected) and saved in high res tiff format files. Dates of pix 1960-1980

[mognetcentral.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to scan a bunch of my old prints, but yeah, negative scanners do a cleaner job and are easily available these days. Depending on how lazy you are though, sending them out to be done for you is good too ;)

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

With *that* much to do, I'd lean toward having a service do it. Even the nicest home and most studio systems are not all that fast. So a service would be faster. I don't know what it would cost though.

The only caveat I'd say to watch, is that occasionally they are sloppy.

One place that printed some of my award winning photos put a HUGE fingerprint on the emulsion side of my Mt. Kilamanjaro portrait. I went right to the lab, and what did they do? Handed me some cleanser and said 'give it a try'. Got maybe 80% off, but not 100% undamaged. Emulsion side. ;/

Over 20 years ago I had some work done at a pro place in Whittier though, and the results were perfect!

[oats-a-plenty.livejournal.com]

Crocuta tells me this gadget is pretty good for the price:

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/consumer/consDetail.jsp?oid=53540925&ref=r0302EWb4B&s_kwcid=epson%20perfection%204490|3084554592&gclid=CJjHkuj_u50CFQ0aawod9Cm3iw