I came across this image in a bunch of my grandfathers things. The problem was that it was just a 4"x5" Black and White negative. It is important to me for two reasons. First, my grandfather loved the Indians. Second, I still have the headdress that he is wearing. When he met these fellows, they were very, very poor and were quickly losing their culture. He helped them make the headdresses that he and the chief are wearing. He also worked with them, teaching them how to make drums, one of which I still have.
Anyway, I wasn't sure what to do with the negative and how to get at least a reasonable image. I opened the regular scanner bed and set it directly on the glass. I then removed the white backing on the scanner so that the light used to illuminate negatives was exposed. I did not use the slide/negative carrier since the negative was too large (You'll note I could not get the entire negative, so I settled for the faces). I set it in place and then set the scan to "film" and "b&W". I used 600 dpi setting. HP has some nice tips for scanning at the following link:
When I got it, it was a little washed out, so I used Adobe CS2 and cropped it and then used "Auto Improve". It added some dense black to the image and for taking a couple of minutes and costing nothing is a pretty good option. Now that I have the image, I'll take the negative to a good pro Photo Shop like Inkleys.
By the way, these are "Shivwits" Indians from around St. George Utah. Grandpa has the moustache.
Nice picture!
ReplyDeleteI love suche old pictures. I can not do it, from a negative like you did. Very interesting!