Best and easiest photo editing software?

[Zoomschwortz]

Today we had my father's funeral and one of the relatives handed me two small boxes of glass negatives that my great grandfather had taken around 100 years ago. She said that she had a few large boxes (apple crate size) at her home and wanted to know if I was interested in copying them.

I am very interested in getting these and I scanned the 16 negatives that I got today, now I need some good editing software that will easily change these negatives into positives and will easily help me make repairs to these pictures.

I only wish that she would have come forward with these while my Dad was still alive, because he would have loved to see them and could have helped me figure out who some of the people were.

Any suggestions for photo editing software?

Thank you for your help.
Ken

[Moose6026]

Not a clue here, but sounds like a great piece of family history right there. Good luck.

[T.G]

My condolences brother.

Depending how much work needs to be done, off the top of my head, photoshop or GIMP are probably your best bets for major touchups, Adobe lightroom and irfanview for minor work.

If you can't get a satisfactory scan, try contacting A&I Labs in Los Angeles, CA or Sharp Photo in Eau Clare, WI, they _might_ be able to help, or at the very least, direct you towards a lab that can.

[Bill86]

What Adam said. There are places that can do this for you, but Photoshop and Lightroom could probably do it as well.

I remember having the same thing done professionally years ago. Just forgot who did the work. I'll see if I can't dig up some information tomorrow.

[spectrrr]

pm sent

[Eleven]

Some all-in-one printers have negative scanning abilities. Are they standard size slides?

I have a ton from my grandfather and I haven't been too successful so far, but I have bee able to rig up my own ghetto style scanner.

I took my regular, old all-in-one Lexmark, removed the lid (it popped right out of its hinges, I think that is a feature) and then I built a frame from cardboard the same size as the glass on the printers scanner.

Then I stretched a plain opaque white trash bag over the frame and taped it all down. This created a "light box" type of apparatus. From there I put the negatives on the scanner glass, the frame over top of that and then I position a fluorescent light over the "light box" and scan as normal.

You must have some sort of back-light to get the scanner to read the negative correctly. Gimp can reverse the scan, and I think plain old "Paint" in windows can as well.

Here are a couple of the first ones I tried:

http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/8674/swordnew.jpg

And, dear old Grandpa and Grandma:

http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/9730/ednora.jpg

[Zoomschwortz]

Thank you so very much for your thoughts, help and suggestions.

I have a Kodak ESP 7250 all in one, but I haven't found an option for making negatives into positives.

The glass plate I have in my possession at this time are 4"x5" but it sounds like some of the ones I haven't seen yet may be as large as 8"x10".

Of the 16 plates I have, some are pretty good and some are pretty bad and may not be savable.

The plates I have are in a couple "Roebuck Orthochromatic" boxes and have what appears to be the original black paper between most of the plates, but they must have run out of the paper and used newspaper to separate some of the plates and it looks like this may have caused some damage.

While she handed these plates to me to see what I could do with them, I'm not really sure what her plans are for the rest of them. She may let me take them home or she may want me to do the work at her home which is about 90 minutes from where I live.

These plates are old and some of the pictures are of my great grand fathers barn being built before 1910. My great grandfather was blinded during surgery some time in the 30's, so his pictures would predate his blindness.

Thanks again.
Ken