Scanning old photo negatives

[redsmetz]

I've been working on scanning a bunch of my parents' old photos and putting them up on Facebook for family to see. I save a box of negatives because I thought that someday maybe the technology would exist where you could scan them and make prints again. Of course, I've since learned that it already exists. I actually saw a special scanner for about $80 that does it, but didn't want to shell out that money.

I read up a little on the web and saw that HP has them, but the piece also noted that HP's "All-in-one" scanners weren't made to do this. That's what we have, but on a whim, I decided to try it and then reverse the image to see what happened.

Here's the result on the two black & white negatives I tried.





The first is a photo of my grandmothers, possibly holding or it could be one of my two younger brothers. It's a clearer picture than the next. The second is my parents holding my oldest brother. I didn't try sharpening the image with the tool in the scanning software.

Has anyone done this before? Is it worth getting a special scanner for. I tried experimenting with a color negative, but it didn't really work out. I suspect there is software that does a lot of the work for you.

Any thoughts? I'm really pumped at being able to access some of the photographs that have been lost but for which negatives still exist. My wife on the other hand is going to wring my neck when she finds out I have more things to scan.

[KronoRed]

I tried this a few years ago and I have to say the special scanner helps, the all in one with "Scanner Attachment" took way too long and the pictures, even with dusting the slides first, just turned out terrible.

[redsmetz]

I'll probably have to look into a special scanner. Here's a number of them I tried with varying degrees of success. There's some real gems in this negatives, so I'm going to want to find a way to get copies made, either of actual prints or digitally.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?ai...9&l=107121ff67