Jill Koelling, Head Digital Imaging Laboratory, Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center, Nebraska State Historical Society Digital Techniques for Image Recovery Applied to Gelatin Glass Plate Negatives Digital imaging is hardly a new topic in the archive, museum, and library field. The speed at which this technology has been incorporated into our culture rivals that of photography itself. For the past several years, many institutions have started impressive scanning projects or have plans to do so in the near future. Therefore, this session was not designed to rehash the technical aspects of digital image creation. Rather, it highlighted the unexpected and often unrealized benefits of this amazing technology.
Digital technology allows damaged negatives to be electronically recovered.
A common malady found in photographic collections are negatives turned bright yellow due to mercury iodide intensification. These negatives are very difficult to print in the darkroom, because the yellowed areas on the negative are virtually transparent. Many institutions gave up on these plates years ago, forgetting about them or in some cases disposing of them completely. Digital imaging offers a new solution. The scanner can record the subtle differences between tonal values in the affected areas of the image enabling information retrieval.