Hello out there film enthusiasts, I have some information that I'm sure will be of interest to at least some of you folks who are struggling with scanning negatives and slides. As it goes: I was given a box of really old negatives from my parents years ago and wanted to scan and archive them. My old flatbed scanner which was able to scan just about anything was not capable of scanning negatives bigger than 2 1/4" square which left me high & dry. Much of the material I have is the old "620" format or larger in the area of about 2 1/2 x 4 3/4". I tried on & off with various "All-in-one" scanner/printers with very poor results. Heavily pixilated, blotchy, blurred images.

I have been using Linux systems for over 10 years now and have been using "Xsane" along with various HP "All-in-one" units to scan photos, doc's & transparencies for which Xsane works great, but not for negatives. Recently I switched scanning software on a whim and tried "Simple Scan" and Viola as they say, I have gotten excellent results!
I can now scan negatives in more or less what ever size I want. The process is somewhat more involved in that there are more steps: 1st: In Simple Scan, set the "preferences" under the "Document" tab, place the desired negative (dull side up) on the scanner and hit "Scan". Next click "Crop" and drag the box sides to the image sides. 3rd: save the image as a jpeg to a file. This is where the extra steps come in. Open Gimp, open the file you want to convert and under "Colors" click "Invert", then also under colors click "Brightness/contrast" as you may want to do some editing. If you want to edit or repair scratches & other blemishes, you will have to experiment with the tools in Gimp (such as "Heal", "Smudge" etc. (works for me!). When you are satisfied with the results, click "Export" to save the positive images to a file as jpeg's.

I wish I could have had this information a long time ago while my folks were still living so as to get information about people in the photos, however it seems no one was able to explain how to scan negatives with the newer scanner/printers. One more tip: if your negatives tend to curl so as to make placing them square on the scanner glass, just breathe lightly on the matt (dull) side before placing them on the glass, they flatten out nicely! Hope this helps you folks with the same predicament I had. Cheers,Tukatz

Nice write-up!

Just out of curiosity, why do you say Xsane doesn't work for negatives? I would think that Xsane and Simple Scan are doing pretty much the same thing: scan the negative and save it. Or were you trying to use Xsane's "scan negatives" options? I've never used them, but even if they did work I would personally still go for editing it in something like GIMP.

And one more thing, if you have a physically small negative, you will definitely want to set your scanner to a higher resolution. With that in mind, I've also seen at least one scanner model that does a "scan, stop, back up, repeat" on the highest resolution and the resulting image is worse than the next lower resolution.

Hi Maples, regarding Xsane Vs Simple scan:
As I mentioned at the start of my article; when I tried to use Xsane to scan B&W negatives, I got really poor results. The images were blotchy, blurred and heavily pixilated.
Simple scan gives me a great image other than the fact I have to "Heal" old scratches and spots that are on the negatives. Yes I have tried to clean them but they have been poorly stored, many for over 60 years.
Exactly why Simple scan works better I cannot explain but the results speak for themselves. Cheers, Tukatz