Scanning 40 odd years old negatives

[zapt1234 Profile]

PICT0713.JPG (1.53 MiB) Viewed 7586 times

I hand purchased a scanner and started scanning the negatives. However, for reasons unknown, the results were very green and unrealistic.
I want to reenact the effect to be as close as when it was when taken. Natural sky, sunny beaches, coconut trees. This was taken in Papua New Guinea in 1979.

[eadams Profile]

I've had some experience scanning old photos (not negatives) and removing severe color casts in Lightroom or Photoshop using color channels in Curves, but I failed miserably trying to extract the original colors from the green photo you posted.

Maybe someone with more expertise than I have can help you. I have no experience in scanning negatives - maybe there is something you can do with your scanner to improve the output. Or maybe your scanner itself is the problem.

If these were my photos and if I really wanted to keep them to preserve the memories I would convert them to black and white.

[Richard Briggs Profile]

I have digitised many negatives and colour slides including glass plate negatives and never encountered this before. Are there any settings on the scanner or associated software that may have caused this? I assume the negatives are colour negatives and not B&W? Maybe there's a setting for each and if it's a colour neg and you have it set for B&W strange things happen?

Depending upon your equipment, if you have a decent DSLR with a macro lens you can produce amazing results simply by photographing the negative and then applying appropriate corrections in PS or similar. But this is quire time consuming as you need to line up the camera with the negative perfectly in terms of everything being central and perpendicular (so tripod). Also decent depth of field (so slow shutter) and also decent light source from behind negative. But you could try a basic hand held test and see if you can at least produce the right colours. That would tell you something,

Richard

[zapt1234 Profile]

There is no setting or controls except +and- but it looks like darkening and softening of the scannung intensity.
There were negatives from other batches that were better. this is among the worse.