Technical Note: Scanning glass negatives at home.

Do not clean the back of this negative with alcohol if you want to keep the original lettering!

Photography quickly became a popular middle-class hobby in the late 1800s. Perhaps your family also has a collection of old glass negatives, these “windows into the past!” While it can be time consuming, it is surprisingly easy to recover the pictures on these and share them with others. So here is a description of how these negatives were digitized. 

(As to the cat picture above, well - things just don't change do they? Our family took lots of pictures of their pets and, this once, wrote a cryptic message on the back of the negative.)

In a nutshell - these negatives were scanned with an Epson V700 scanner into 1200 dpi, 8-bit grayscale, tiff files. For posting onto this blog, copies of the copies of the files were resized into 300 to 600 dpi jpegs.

Here is the longer description:

Equipment. I scanned these glass negatives at home using an Epson Perfection V700 scanner (around $600.00).  This scanner has a full size transparency unit. Essentially that means that it has 2 lights: one in the base – for normal scanning and one in the lid- for “transparencies”, i.e. slides and negatives. Its advantage over the cheaper Epson scanners is that it can scan a larger transparency, (8x10”). My glass negatives are mainly 4x6 inches, a few are 5x7 inches and a few are broken and or smaller. 

   At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for Epson, I like their scanners. They have good "depth of field",  things put on them, whether flat or 3 dimensional' tend to scan “in focus”. I’ve been using Epson scanners for years because I’ve been successful with them, so I really don’t have much experience with other scanners. They might all be just as great. I should also mention that I have a relatively new Dell with a lot of RAM and a large hard drive running Windows 7.

Cleaning.  I cleaned the non-emulsion side of the negative using ethyl alcohol and a lint-free soft cloth. This worked well except for the one (embarrassing) case where I cleaned off the handwritten ink label which was on (of course) the non-emulsion side. Cleaning the negatives made a huge difference. There was a lot of dust, dirt, occasionally bits of emulsion, and sometimes a mold-like patina on the negatives.  All of this came off pretty easily in the cleaning.

   While I read that the emulsion side could be cleaned by carefully brushing it with a soft brush, for the most part I left it alone. I limited my cleaning on the emulsion side to carefully peeling away loose tissue paper that was stuck to it. (This was the result of someone trying to protect the negatives from scratching by layering them with tissue paper. Unfortunately, in some cases the tissue paper bonded with the emulsion.) Also I carefully pried apart negatives that were stuck together. For the most part these came apart easily. They tended to be stuck along the edges, not in the middle.

Scanning.  It didn’t seem to be a good idea to lay my negatives directly on the scanner glass. I was worried about scratching the scanner glass and I didn’t want to get the weird wavy lines that you sometimes get when you try to scan glass to glass. At the suggestion of another (unknown and thus uncited) web page:

   I cut matt board into frames for my negatives . Take the matt board (the kind used in picture frames and cut rectangles in it slightly smaller than the size of your negatives. For the 4x6 negatives, I could cut two holes and scan 2 negatives at a time.
   Postition this on the scanner glass.
   Position your negatives with the emulsion side up.
   Close the scanner lid and run a preview scan.

Scan settings. After searching around on the internet looking to see what others were doing. I decided to scan my negatives at 1200 bpi, 8 bit grayscale, tiff files. This was the archival standard used by libraries and others building digital collections. I figured if I was going to go to this much work, I might as well create a useful file. In some cases I even scanned small areas of the negatives into a 2400 bpi file. (Please note – the pictures in this blog are “downsized”copies of my original scans, easy to share, but lacking in some of the detail of the larger files.)

   Specific to the Epson scanner– I use “professional mode” – this gives me more options for settings. Document type is set at “Film (with Film Area Guide), B&W Negative Film, 8-bit Grayscale, 1200 dpi. I turn all of the adjustments OFF. In other words, I DON’T use “unsharp mask”, grain reduction, dust removal.
   There is one adjustment I do use. After my preview scan has been run, I outline each negative with the “marquee” tool and then I use the “histogram” chart to correct the black/white balance if needed. In the little picture above – I’ve set the pointer to show the button to push for the histogram.

Final steps.  Then I click the “all button” to make sure both my negatives are scanned, hit the scan button, choose “tiff” and go clean a couple more negatives, returning 5 to 7 minutes later when the scans have been completed, put my next negatives on the scanner and start the process over.

Finally, obviously tissue paper had not served well as an archival solution, as I finished scanning each negative, I placed it in archival 4 fold negative holders and wrote the file name on the holder.

Yes – it was time consuming, but it was also as fun as rifling through boxes in an attic. I have found so many interesting treasures. And truthfully - the scanning was the "quick" part of investigating these pictures - figuring out who and what and when and where - has been much more challenging.

Identifiers: Negative # Paulson033