Fun With Scans

If you're like me, some of your favorite pics from "way back" are in albums. Cool, but, where are the negs?

A lot of my 'serious' stuff, and most of my non portrait pro work through the years is as chromes or slides. But, a lot of good photos came about as I was just playing or on vacation, loaded with colour neg film. 

Films such as Kodacolor and Fujicolor had excellent colour rendition and quite a lot of exposure latitude. So, I could leave my camera on an auto setting, or just use the Sunny 16 Rule and concentrate on having fun. I knew I would still get some nice pics from that approach.

But, after 30 years, where are those old negatives? I had been storing mine but a flood (and the mold later) took away a lot of those old film negatives. I still have some high quality prints, tho, so I scanned them.

Scan them yourself using your all-in-one from HP or Canon or whatever, and you're likely to get an editable jpeg file of about 2 to 5 MP to work with. Clean up the dust, either in a PS type program or using the scanner's dust settings. Of course, a high end scanner, a photo specific scanner, or a scanning service will give even better results, but any of us with an scanner of any kind can still play.

I found an old pic from 1979 of the Brooklyn Bridge that I did, so I started with that:

raw scan

This is from a low price Canon all-in-one. The original photo was shot on a Kodak Pony from the 1950s.

So, now we clean it up a bit. Straighten, adjust the faded print colours, etc... Since it's a jpeg of a print, I don't have a whole lot of info to work with (as I would with a RAW file or large/fine jpeg), but I had enough. Here is the retouched pic:

retouched

Have some old pics you want to share on Facebook? Feel like playing around to tweak your PhotoShop skills? Just like your old stuff and want to look at it on your computer/tablet/phone? Then, scan your old prints!

Here is some playing I did with this file, converting it to B & W:

Black & White

Enjoy!