I can remember back in the early days of the digital revolution, the pricey film scanners that people would buy.

I had all but forgotten them. Then today I was cleaning out a drawer and found a bunch of old film negatives. Most of them were junk, and one of them had gotten bent in the drawer the last time i closed it.

I was about to toss the bent one, when I decided to take a look at it. Some twenty years ago, I had taken a picture of an old photograph of my grandparents, thinking I would reproduce the photo someday. I had completely forgotten about it. This was the negative I took, and after saving it all these years I had recently unwittingly bent the crap out of it.

Feeling a little guilty, I decided to make a last ditch attempt at recovery with tools at hand.

I loaded the film on top of the scanner that came with my multi-purpose printer (Canon MP390). You know, one of those things that’s a printer, scanner, copier and fax machine. By every definable metric, a piece of junk. Still, as a testament to mass-produced digital technology, it out-performed anything I can remember “back-in-the-day”.

I placed the bent negative on the flatbed scanner and closed the lid. Next I tried to scan the negative as you would anything else, and got the results youd expect; crap. So then I stopped, thought about it a bit and approached the problem a little differently.

First, I dug around in the scanner software looking for a screen that I could really turn all the dials on. Most scanner software tries to make things easy by rolling all the myriad of options into a single button for you, representing the best options for common usage. This was far from that.

After poking around a bit, I found the “advanced” button, which on this Canon software was essentially access to the driver’s configuration screens. Here’s what I did:

1. Set the scanning resolution to its highest setting. In my case, that was 1200DPI (dots per inch).
2. Select the area to be scanned as just the area of the negative. No need to scan the entire 8×10 area. This also speeds up the process alot.
3. Zoom in on the film so that you can see whats going on.
4. Set the white point to the color of the unexposed or most transparent part of the film. This is key.
5. Set the destination file format to something uncompressed, like BMP or TIFF. NOT JPEG.

Scan away. After all that, I ended up with this:

Of course it would have been better if I had gotten it straight, but as bent as it was it was hard to predict how it would sit once you closed the lid. Anyway, I brought it into photoshop, and fooled around with the image a bit after inverting it. I eventually ended up turning it into a duotone. Here it is:

Believe it or not, that’s pretty much how I remember the original looking. It was taken sometime around 1900 and was pretty beat up when I photographed it sometime around 1979.