Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Scanning from old photo versus negative...

I am working on an anniversary scrapbook and creating layouts for every year we have been married. In December we will celebrate our 32nd anniversary. I had a lot of layouts to do so I decided to work backwards so I could start with my digital photos. After those layouts were done I started scanning in my photos. It actually was going along quite well until I got to 1981. All of my photos (except one*) had faded to a reddish dull color. I edited it in Photoshop but the results were not that great. It occurred to me that  my scanner has the capability of scanning in negatives so I went on a hunt for the negatives. It took me a bit of work but I did find them. I went through all the negatives that were dated 1981 but the photo I wanted wasn't there. My eyes fell on the humongous pile of non-dated negatives! It was a daunting task but I persevered and luckily found the negative for the photo I wanted. I could not believe the difference in scanning from the negative. The color and sharpness was so much better.

Here is the photo from 1981 that I scanned in


Here is the photo after I edited it in Photoshop

Not bad but on the layout it just looked washed out.

Here is a scan from the original negative

Much better!

After a little tweaking in Photoshop here is the final picture


And...here is the layout that I used the photo on


Although scanning from the negative was a little more effort, the results were superior. I have now added organizing my negatives to my long list of things I want to do.

*Do you want ot know the one picture that was not fade?. It was an Instamatic Polaroid picture. Go figure!

7 comments:

Jacquie said...

wow ! so cool to see the different versions of your efforts, i do agree the bottom is best !

Good for you !

Sara E said...

oh wow... what a difference!!!! it looks super nice with the negative

thekreativelife said...

Oh my goodness! Thank you SO much for sharing this. I've been debating scanning photos vs. negatives/slides, but you've just saved me quite a bit of time and research! Bless you!

And that layout is absolutely fabulous! I love how you put it together so nicely.

(*Just stopping by from Elisha's BPS class.)

thekreativelife said...

I had to share this with my Facebook friends . . . hope you don't mind!

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nancy said...

WOW! you did miracles with that photo!!!!!!!

JobaScraps said...

Thank you for sharing this with the LETS SCRAP class.