At some point in the past I scanned some of my old prints. I recently started scanning the negatives of ones that hadn't already been done. The negatives haven't been touched since the time the photographs were returned from printing. It's interesting to see how much degradation of the negatives has taken place even though they haven't been removed from the sleeves. I can only assume that the conditions they have been kept in have caused them to adhere to each other and lose some parts of the pigment, and perhaps during the numerous moves they have rubbed against each other and become scratched. It might have been useful to gently warm them in a humid atmosphere before removing them from the packets, that could have prevented further damage that might have occurred.
I thought it would be worthwhile to see the difference in quality between using a flatbed scanner on the prints was more ideal than using a negative scanner.
This is a scan of a print using a pretty cheap flatbed scanner. Original scanned size 1725x1168.
And this is a close up of Kelvin Flats seen in the image at the original size within the image. Size 328x141.
This is the same photograph but the scan is of the negative. A much greater DPI than it needed. This image is 9995x6748.
And here is the same close-up of Kelvin Flats, but here it is reduced in size - the negative was scanned at higher DPI than the flatbed scan. Size 1657x752
I'm not convinced there's a huge amount of difference here. Perhaps there's a little more detail from the negative but it's very clear that the quality is much lower given the number of specks and scratches.
Maybe scanning the negative at a lower DPI than the print and having a better quality negative might help.
Maybe scanning the negatives 25 years ago would have helped even more. Obviously out of the question. Now where did I put my time machine.
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