Darkroom prints of old films as alternative to scans.

[Ko.Fe.]

From previous night. Old soviet b/w negative film, family archive.
Film is scratched all over and bent at some frames. I was trying to scan it and it was not so good.
Printed on same age old Agfa Brovira BN 117 #2 5x7 fiber paper. And it came much better comparing to scans.

Where are in-law and my wife, grandparents and other relatives on those pictures. Our daughter is looking at mother's pictures. Similar age, different time.

It is my second attempt to get better images on prints instead of scans for old and damaged b/w negatives. Once prints are flat, I'll scan them to have clean electronic copy.

 

[benji77]

Great work bringing back those memories!

 

[Bill Clark]

Nice job!

I would imagine it brings back fond memories.

 

[Johnmcd]

I agree totally. I recently tried to scan some very poor quality negs from the 1940's. Very dense. The scanner produced terrible scans. Much better prints were produced. By giving it enough exposure time and upping the contrast, I could get some very reasonable prints which I then scanned on a flatbed.

 

[Godfrey]

Flatbed and film scanners generally do a better job at scanning and retrieving images from film which is severely underexposed vs film which is overexposed, and making quality prints from such scans is often quite difficult.

However, "scanning" via a copy setup (camera on stand with macro lens and a light box illuminating the negative), like printing and scanning prints, can do a very good job of capturing very overexposed negatives.

Different situations just require different techniques. Printing and then scanning the prints works well, but of course requires that you have a darkroom set up for making prints. Many people scan nowadays because they have no darkroom.

G