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Digital BW, The Print

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Re: [Digital BW] 60 year old negatives

2003-11-24 by Alan Zinn

At 04:14 AM 11/24/03 +0000, you wrote:
>My father took quite a few photos of the 1939 World's Fair with his 
>Rollei.  The
>negatives were stored for 64 years in "Nega-Print Album."  The album is 
>made up of
>soft paper envelopes that two photos were attached to the front and back 
>and the
>four corresponding negatives were stored inside.
>
>I just had the negatives scanned to TIFFs at a local shop and was quite 
>surprised at
>the amount of grain showing.  There was a little dust, no prints, and no
>scratches.  But, the grain is strange.  Maybe the chemistry of the 
>negatives changed
>over time, some interaction with the envelopes, or they weren't totally 
>fixed.  Anyway,
>there's going to be quite a lot of PS work to do before these are 
>printable.  Lot's of
>work ahead of me.
>
>Hal

Hal,

  The problem may only be in the way they were scanned. I don't think the 
grain structure of  film changes with time. If the negs are "normal" 
looking they are as they originally were. What resolution were they scanned?

I read somewhere about proof sheets giving excellent scans.  Maybe you can 
get better results scanning the prints rather than the negs.

AZ

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