I've come to realise the importance of storing negatives properly. I failed to do so in the past because I just assumed that I would not be needing them anymore because I didn't have access to a dark room and still don't. I once bought a flatbed scanner that can scan negatives but I never got around to using it to its full potential because I was really very busy.
This is when Covid19 helped me. Although, I think it would have been better if this virus didn't come into the world. Still, it did give me more time to do things and one of the things I did was finally go through all my old photos, negatives and learnt how to use my Canoscan 8800f. I also subscribed to Adobe's Photography Plan and finally started to learn how to use Lightroom and Photoshop properly after so many years of wanting to. I really never needed to use either properly because my work didn't require it and it remained one of the things I have always wanted to do.
One of the downsides about living in Singapore is that the weather is really not very conducive for storing things that need a drier, cooler atmosphere. And I was an idiot too. Over the years, I forgot about my negatives and just shoved them all over the place and some files also had a bunch of heavy books stacked on it. So in the end, the negatives aren't in the best of conditions which mean that I need to do a lot of cleanup work on them.
In the end, I have to say that I am grateful that computers and software have become good enough and inexpensive enough that fixing these photos are easily possible. I'm not even sure if I am capable of of if it's even possible to fix all the dust and the degradation on these negative if I had to do it the traditional way in the dark room.
This took a bit of effort to fix. The sky was actually not too difficult, just needed a certain amount of patience. The base of the Statue of Liberty was a bit of a pain because of the varied shades of grey in the texture. One thing that was helpful was my time spent dust busting and cleanup on hi-res scans of large format films in my previous job. Having fixed far dirtier negatives, this was actually not too bad because its a still and even at 3200dpi, it's not crazy big.
Here's the image after I finished the cleanup and "printed" it. I was quite happy with the outcome. :)
Healing Brush and Content-Aware Fill is really impressive. The Patch Tool was also particularly useful. I'm curious about GIMP. It seems like they have similarly powerful features too. But I think I'll first learn how to use Photoshop like a pro too before I try GIMP.
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