Scan from 1961 Negative - San Juan, P.R.

redleash

I have started scanning slides and negatives that belonged to my late father. He took lots of pics when I was a baby and we lived in Puerto Rico. I decided to try some editing on this one to see how it turned out. Still needs a little touchup in the sky to remove some scratches, but overall I was pleased with it. This image came from a negative, but I'm not even sure what type of camera he had.

Not bad for a nearly 50-year-old negative, eh?

I'd appreciate any comments/suggestions, on this image or on the process. I'm using an Epson V500 scanner at 800 res. My scanner goes up to 1200, which I did use on a few of the slides just to see how well it worked.

Thanks,
Lauren

redleash

Still hoping for feedback
I hoped somebody would have a comment or two. I'm really interested in others' experiences/tips on scanning old slides and negatives. Since I didn't take these, I certainly won't claim credit for them. I'd just like to get some good images to share with my family.

Any feedback would be appreciated. If none, that's OK too. I'll post some of my own stuff soon--I've gotta start showing results from my new 70-300 Nikkor VR!

Thanks,
Lauren

Dave Clee

Wow, thats really impressive, I'd say considering the source not bad at all...

You could put together a nice series of black and whites from that collection and mount them..

Just a thought.

Cheers

Dave

JAG

I don't have any suggestions about scanning...but you did well at preserving this. I will be going to San Juan next month. It will be interesting if I can see where this was taken. I hear that there are lots of historic forts there.

Malte

redleash wrote:

I have started scanning slides and negatives that belonged to my late father. He took lots of pics when I was a baby and we lived in Puerto Rico. I decided to try some editing on this one to see how it turned out. Still needs a little touchup in the sky to remove some scratches, but overall I was pleased with it. This image came from a negative, but I'm not even sure what type of camera he had.

Not bad for a nearly 50-year-old negative, eh?

I'd appreciate any comments/suggestions, on this image or on the process. I'm using an Epson V500 scanner at 800 res. My scanner goes up to 1200, which I did use on a few of the slides just to see how well it worked.

Thanks,
Lauren

I would love to do this myself with my dads old positives, it's just that there's stacks and stacks of boxes of them. A bit daunting, but it's inspirational to see that others are taking the plunge.

How are you finding using a flatbed scanner for negatives? I would think that the final image resolution would be on the low side, especially on 800. Can I see the original file?

Malte

photodoug

you forgot to include birds or babies in your scans....you'd get more comments if you did. ha.

I find the most difficult part of doing this is the color balance. Your colors are dead on...very impressed. Can you share the technical aspects of your scan: hardware, software, settings?

While the slide is sharp and colors vibrant, the subject matter isn't that composed that well....but this is a shot of your dad's....so there's the merit for you. Maybe you ought to make a nice photo album of these. Typically slides sit in dark linen closets and don't get shared often.

Post more from this series!

NomadRip

I wouldn't have known that was so old of a picture. Good job! I was just there a couple of months ago, and it still looks like that

BBiggs

That is excellent!!! For a scan of a negative half a century old that is really something!!! The colors are still saturated and the sharpness is very good!

t-rev

I'm looking at doing the same thing. My father was a photographer in the Navy during Vietnam and has boxes of slides/negatives. I would like to get them scanned and archived onto CDs.

How long does it take to scan each pic? Are you happy with the Epson V500?

Malte

t-rev wrote:

I'm looking at doing the same thing. My father was a photographer in the Navy during Vietnam and has boxes of slides/negatives. I would like to get them scanned and archived onto CDs.

How long does it take to scan each pic? Are you happy with the Epson V500?

Was he one of those soldier photographers? He got to keep those negatives? Well I guess he would have snapped every other shot with his own camera. My dad was UN in Kongo. The more I think of it the more it feels like a treasure trove, just sitting there. :oogle

I've heard it takes atleast 10 min. per scan, but I think that was with a negative/slide scanner plus postprocessing. I guess with a flatbet scanner you could scan a whole bunch in a go so that should shave some of the time off but PP probably makes up most of the 10 min.

The way I see it I've got two options. Scan everything quick an dirty without PP, or have an old fashion slideshow night and pick out the good ones and scan/PP those really well.

Malte

NomadRip

Malte wrote:

Was he one of those soldier photographers? He got to keep those negatives? Well I guess he would have snapped every other shot with his own camera. My dad was UN in Kongo. The more I think of it the more it feels like a treasure trove, just sitting there. :oogle

Whether he was a soldier stationed at the U.S. Navy base that was in Puerto Rico at the time, or a civilian, Puerto Rico is and was then a U.S. territory. He wasn't in a warzone or occupied country of some sort. I'd assume they were his personal pictures, and not property of the military.

DaddyO

The scan turned out pretty nice. Haven't looked into the Epson V500.
Was thinking of getting a used Epson 4870 but have yet to commit.
Theres the price & + this other issue.
Seems the resolution and such doesn't allow for much cropping if you
felt you want to do that with the shot. But I understand if you don't
crop the scan is just fine for most things.

redleash

Thanks for all the comments and ideas! By way of background, I owe my mom a big "thank you" for doing the sorting. She's been in an organizing mood the last couple years and she tackled all of my dad's old slides, sorting them by dates and categories and putting them in slide holder sheets and notebooks. I'm going to start scanning those next. The slides in this thread were in a shoebox (so much for preservation!) I found in a closet.

I started out scanning the color slides at 800 res, then switched to 2400, resulting in a file size of 4800 x 3146. I scanned some B&W negs at 800 and they did nicely; haven't tried them yet at a higher res to see if they get any better. They definitely need PP because there are scratches and spots, but they cleaned up pretty nicely. As ya'll have seen and commented, the color stayed pretty accurate, although I did beef up the saturation a bit. For the El Moro (fort) pic, I also did some selective levels in some areas.

I'm really pleased with the Epson V500. It has a "home" and a "professional" method; the pro method will scan up to 12,800 res. Not sure how long that would take. At 2400, it only took a couple of minutes for me to scan 4 color slides (you can do 4 at once), check the preview, and save the files. The PP took longer, of course. This scanner comes with two adapters, one for medium format negatives--I had a few of those also and found that the most troublesome. It does only one strip or a couple individual negs at once, and getting them in the right place is a trick; I got a lot of cut-off images and partial images. The 35mm neg strips worked fine and you can do two strips at once.

It's definitely a long process if you have hundreds to do, but I think Malte's idea of having a slideshow night and choosing the slides to scan/process is the best approach. If you don't have a projector, you can buy a handheld slide viewer pretty cheaply.

One problem I had was figuring out which was front and back of the slides. I ended up with a lot of reverse images on my screen, but with a quick horizontal flip in PS, that was fixed--a lot faster than re-scanning them!

Lauren

redleash

Here's the original scan of the image in my first post:




And here are a few more pics from slide scans, with some minor PP:

NomadRip

redleash wrote:

That scanner works great!!

Here are those cannons on the left side of that picture, but taken this past August

redleash

Thanks, James! Looks like there hasn't been much change at the fort in the last 50 years!!