5×7 Dry Plate | Negative Scanned Scanning a 5×7 dry plate requires proper plate handling, scanning using a flatbed scanner, and managing the file produced.
Handling The substrate of the dry plate is glass. That is, the photographic emulsion is dried on a 5″ x 7″ piece of plate glass with beveled edges. One must exercise caution when handling the sheet glass; both not to get cut and not to damage the exposed emulsion. The exposed emulsion on the plates scratch and smudge very easily. They must be picked up by the edges with no sliding against other plates or the packing sheets. The box I am restoring has several ruined plates due to improper handling. In some cases, the damage is bad enough that the image on the plate can not be restored.
Scanning This plate was scanned using an Epson Perfection V600 flatbed scanner. The scan was a 2400 bpi straight scan using 16 bit gray scale into a 471 MB TIFF file with no software fixes or enhancements on the inbound scan. I tried scanning with both the emulsion side down on the scanner glass and with the shiny side down on the glass. Although it seems obvious that a sharper scan should result from the emulsion side down, it worked out better for me to put the shiny side down. Sometimes, emulsion gets onto the shiny side and must be cleaned off before the scan. Scanning with the shiny down also eliminates the need to flip the image in software.
File A 471 MB TIFF file is a big file to manage, particularly if many dry plates must be scanned. I tried using 8 bit gray scale. It reduced the file size without much reduction in image clarity. If there was a large number of plates to scan, I’d experiment a bit more to get the file size down.
See 5×7 Dry Plate | a 7 Image Story for a description of all the restoration steps taken for this image.
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