Originally Posted by
DGlenday
At one point a few years ago, while I was working from home, I spent 6 months scanning all of my (many thousands of) old negatives and slides. I used a Nikon scanner that is purpose-made for negatives and slides.
The good news:
All of my old pics are now digital, and are backed up in half a dozen places.
The bad news:
The deterioration of the negative and slide stock was interesting:
- Some were so grainy it was almost impossible to make out the pictures. A LOT of photoshopping (GIMP, Paint.net, ACDSee, and various other tools) helped me bring them back to the quality of a really bad but viewable picture.
- Others were almost as clear as a modern-day digital image.
- These had all been stored in the same container, in the same dark, cool, and dry location.
- Some of the film that deteriorated badly was bought at the same time, from the same store, and were the same make and specifications, as others that had aged well.
Weird.
But in summary - I would urge you to scann all of your old pics ASAP. Or if you don't have the time to do it (and it's a very slow process), there are labs that will do it for you. Not as well, or with the care you would apply, but you'll save those memories.
Sometimes you can rescue a colour image by decomposing once it's scanned, you run decompose, this will leave you with 3 monochrome images, one for each channel, pick the best channel, the dyes in colour film do not fade at the same rate, blues tend to fade the fastest. I've noticed that from 1977 -- my oldest stuff, about 90% of the colour negatives are faded beyond the point of recovery, although many even older prints are still pretty good. The Black and white stuff, that was processed by a lab has a 95% survival rate. The stuff, I processed myself, has a 100% survival rate. The Kodachrome is 100%.
Amateur films from that period were designed to last long enough to get them printed, they were not designed to last more then a few years. Considering that many of the toxic chemicals from that time, like formaldehyde can no longer be used in photography, I would give newer colour film a shorter life span, not a longer one. Most of my images I want to keep, from over the years is B&W, and the life span on those is something beyond mine.
If someone reading this is thinking, what about movies like The Wizard of Oz which was released in 1939, it's colour and has survived well. The Wizard of Oz was filmed in Technicolor, so essentially the original is on B&W film (a beam splitter and 3 colour filters, in front of 3 B&W negative films ) these are then merged back together for printing.
Most likely the ones that deteriorated badly, had large expanses of image that were blue (it's the yellow dye that fades the fastest), while the ones that did not had a lot of red based colour.