Restoring old negatives: the bad and the not quite so bad.

As hinted a couple of blog posts ago (From ‘57 to 57), I’ve been resurrecting a stash of old film negatives from those halcyon days when I first started learning about photography after I’d bought an SLR. And by “resurrecting” I mean separating them from the stuck-together block some of them had become. A couple of people have asked me what I did, so a quick post is in order.

In essence, the film processing service I used back in the day (30-35 years ago, note) put all the negative strips in a little paper folder when it returned the processed film with the photos. Over time, humidity has taken its toll and the emulsion side of the strips has become stuck to the glossy side of others. Even worse, with some of the processed rolls, the emulsion on some of them has actually become stuck to the paper of the folder. In other words, it was a mess, photography-wise.

For the first set of negatives, I tried carefully separating them, but I was worried I was causing too much damage to the negatives. So I went a different route: I dumped a stuck block of strips into a bowl of water. I also put the merest smear of washing up liquid on my finger and mixed it in well in the water to provide a hydrophobic agent for the negatives – it would help the strips separate and shed the water droplets later. After about 5 minutes, I would tease apart the negatives under the water and they came apart pretty easily. After that I shook them in the air and hung them up to dry (using straightened out paper clips), playing the air from a fan on them to help the drying process. Since we’ve been having some hot weather here in Colorado, they dried after an hour or so.

After that it was a case of placing them in the film tray in my scanner (a two-year-old Canon 9000F, although probably replaced with something else by now – ah ha, the Mark II) and scanning them. I then placed the strips in some archival storage pages (the ones I used allow for 7 strips of four negatives apiece) for safekeeping. I will admit though that in my scanning I did not spend too much time making sure that any dust was blown off (or in our house, cat fur) – in essence I was only scanning them so that I had digital copies. If there were one I wanted to use in particular, I could always rescan later with more care. And of course, it must be remembered that these negatives were not in the best of shape anyway. Besides which, for those photos I wanted to display here or on my Facebook page, there was always Adobe Photoshop and its damn clever context-sensitive healing brush.

Here’s an example of an unprocessed scanned photo:

Note the specks of dust and, even worse, the big splotch of fiber in the middle of the shot – this photo appeared in one of those strips that was stuck to the paper folder (it was frame 36, in fact). This could, in all honesty, do with being recleaned and rescanned, but let’s see what 10 minutes of Photoshop work can do.

OK, so I’ve also cropped using the rules of thirds, and I’ve messed with the contrast, exposure, and vibrance as well, but it looks a lot better than it did.

You’d think though that digitizing these negatives would be the end of it. Perhaps not. This evening I read this intriguing article about digital decay and the very real possibility of our digital memories becoming unreadable because file formats change, backup media becomes unreadable, and so on. Perhaps I should print these photos off again…

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