Scanning B & W Negatives

One of the things I inherited from my father was his collection of photographs, including black and white images, color images, slides and thousands of negatives.  It was straight-forward to scan in the images, but the slides and negatives were problematic.  Over the years I have used specialized 35mm slide scanners and several flat-bed scanners that were designed for negative scanning.  Unfortunately, for inexpensive scanners the drivers for scanning negatives typically only handle 35mm and one or two other smaller formats, while my negatives included all sizes (my father must have owned a dozen cameras--all different!).

I finally decided that the primary difference between scanning a photo vs. negative on my Canon scanner is that with negatives there was an auxiliary light built into the cover that followed the scan.  With that in mind I tried scanning negatives by placing them under a glass plate with a light above them.  With a bright enough light it was *almost* possible to  get a decent copy.  After considerable trial and error I came up with the following, which works beautifully (IMHO).

I purchased two pieces of window glass that would just fit the glass in the scanner (for the Canon 8600 that is 8.5 x 11.5 inches).  I used clear tape to fasten the glass plates together so that they could be opened like a book (I fastened the short side), and used a small piece of tape to create a tab that allowed me to easily lift the "negative holder" from the scanner.  The bright light was easy--the sun!  I removed the top from the Canon and placed it on a small table in direct sunlight.  After experimenting for several days I found that a piece of translucent white plastic (salvaged from an old slide viewer) placed over the negative holder gave the best results with razor sharp scans.

I set the scanner to "Grayscale" and saved the images in TIFF format.  Keep in mind that you probably will want to use a high resolution scan (I was using 800 dpi for most of my work).  Using 800 dpi or higher will require a significant amount of memory and will require long scan times.  I constructed a second negative holder  so that I could load one while the other was scanning.

After scanning I used Photoshop to invert the negatives and rotate and crop them.

Below is the "raw scan" for a selection of negatives of different sizes and the final image for one of the images (this one was done at 600 dpi).

Happy scanning!